Lakoff Points Out How Easy It is

My favorite teenage blogger, Caleb, has a new post at The Red Voice commenting on the latest column from liberal George Lakoff, who explains how it easy it is to "play" the party of nuance, even with a single sentence.

1.Rove changed the context of discourse, from Bush’s disaster in Iraq, to support for Bush in the wake of 911.

2.The Democrats had had the Republicans playing defense; Rove put them on offense and the Democrats on defense.

3.With the words “savagery” and “attack”, Rove evoked the frame in which war is the appropriate response. He thus made Bush the heroic Commander-in-Chief in the war frame, while making “liberals” wimps for wanting to deny Bush unlimited war powers.

4.Rove thus evoked the conservative branding of liberals as weak and conservatives as strong.

5.When the Democrats attacked Rove for his remarks and defended themselves, they wound up expressing support for Bush’s going to war after 911, and with it implicit support for Bush’s position in Iraq.

6.Rove made putative Democratic weakness the issue, and by negating the frame, the Democrats played right into his hands.

7.Moreover, using the word “liberal” and not “Democrat”, Rove made it look like any Democrat attacking his remarks was a lily-livered liberal, and that the party had been taken over by weak-kneed chickens – anyone against Bush’s use of the military.

8.This enabled the right-wing message machine to go to work, attacking the Democrats as being controlled by naïve unpatriotic weaklings – MoveOn,org, Howard Dean, George Soros, Michael Moore.

9.Rove, of course, stood tall and strong, sticking by his guns, with a loud chorus of supporters.

10.This enabled Scott McClellan, the administration mouthpiece, to call for a nation debate on conservative – liberal philosophy, beginning with the handling of 911.

Perhaps next time, knee-jerk liberals should wait until after they hear from Lakoff on how to respond to criticism from the Bush administration. Of course, that would defy the very definition of "knee-jerk liberal," which is, in fact, a redundancy in itself.

It's kind of like referring to a hydra as "many headed."