You Call It “Weasel”; “Progressives” Call It “Mink”

The Democrats have been waging a war for the English language.  Part of that war is harping on how the Republicans are…well, waging a war for the English language.

Rhetoric – using language to try to control how people think about issues – is as old as politics itself.

And Jill Klausen – writing at Kos, Re-Elect Democrats and Alternet and, no doubt other members of the big leftyblog cluster-cuddle – has some suggestions for the left on how to do it more effectively, with her list of five terms Democrats should never use.

But not before explaining a bit about how the Republicans have learned a thing or two:

We talk about the “Death Tax” and not the proper term, “Estate Tax.” Two little words—”Death Panels”—were capable of nearly derailing the best thing that’s happened to health insurance in this country in decades.

Um, yeah.

That was a good one, actually.  Smart Democrats went “wow – that WAS effective”.  Democrats with intellectual opportunities said “there’s no such thing!”, ignorant of how managed care has always worked.  Too much explaining for them to do; it was a great term.

Misleading?  Well, not really, not the way Republicans actually used it; in managed care, you do have a group of doctors, attorneys and administrators figuring out what treatments would and would not be cost-effective.  Is it a death panel?  If you were 95 and had liver failure and the group figured a liver transplant wasn’t the best use of a donor liver, yes, it could very well be.  What DO you call that group?  Is it different when it works for the government, as opposed to an HMO?  Of course!

But this isn’t about real explanations; this is about language:

Harvard-educated President Obama is universally considered “elite,” while Yale-educated George W. Bush is considered “down home.”

Give it a rest, Dems; not only did you spend eight years chanting that Bush was stupid, you’re the ones who claimed an Ivy League education one of Obama’s great qualifications!  Bill Maher – the exposed intellectual id of the Democratic Party on the national level, in the same way that “Two Putt Tommy” is for the Minnesota DFL – once “joked” “you hate Obama because he went to Harvard, and you resurface driveways for a living”.

So while this article is about using language to frame things, you sort of did his one yourself.  Just saying.

And it’s all a diversion, because the article actually is a useful primer on how framing is done.

As Progressive Democratic linguist George Lakoff explains it, this “framing” is crucial to how they’ve managed to win so much of the debate…This sleight-of-tongue has managed to manipulate at least half the country into believing things that simply are not true.

Well, yes and no.  Rhetoric – “framing” – is never about truth, and it’s never not about truth; it’s about using language to get people to believe things.

It can be a big, clumsy club, designed to woo the stupid – like Alliance For A Better Minnesota, whose “Tom Emmer Favorited Lowering DWI Penalties” gulled 43% of Minnesota’s less-gifted.  Or it can be incredibly subtle.

Ms. Klausen has some suggestions of her own – the aforementioned “five things” Democrats shouldn’t say:

1. Never say Entitlements.

–Instead, say Earned Benefits.

Which, worst case, would send Republicans into a frenzy of explaining that those benefits are almost never “earned”, while Democrats cash in all those votes from the dumb people whose egos they’ve stroked.

2. Never say Redistribution of Wealth.

–Instead, say Fair Wages For Work.

By which they mean “Fair Wages For Other Peoples’ Work”.

3. Never say Employer Paid Health Insurance.

–Instead, say Employee Earned Health Insurance.

That’d be a tough one to reframe.  My suggestion would be “unicorn-paid health insurance”.  That’s where Dems think money comes from.

4. Never say Government Spending.

–Instead, say The People Are Investing.

They’ve been trying this one for decades.

5. Never say Corporate America.

–Instead, say Unelected Corporate Government.

Now, this is the first genuinely dumb idea in the article, and I do hope the Democrats run with this one hard hard hard.

So as I’m working away at my day job today, paying for other peoples’ earned benefits and fair wages for my work, wondering what rathole the people elected by the dumb people are “investing” my money down, I’ll be watching for the Unelected Corporate Government Press Department doing this sort of framing for our good-heavens-not-elite President.

19 thoughts on “You Call It “Weasel”; “Progressives” Call It “Mink”

  1. Recent example the Liberals won:

    Contraception means prevents conception. Rubber, IUD, the Pill.
    Birth control means a prevents birth. All of the above, PLUS abortion.

    The fight was about government forcing a religious organization to engage in practices it considered abhorrent and was therefore a clearn violation of the famous separation of church and state; but Liberals skillfully shifted the debate to poor college students who couldn’t afford birth control pills because Conservatives were such uptight, judgmental prudes and name-callers.

    This stuff IS important, Mitch. Keep hammering it.

  2. Actually Nate, ripping the unborn out of a womb is now “women’s health care”. Language is so fungible.

    And 43% of Minnesota’s less-gifted. cracked me up. I’m less generous in my verbiage.

  3. A baby is a clump of cells; failure to celebrate the pop culture cause du jour is “HATE”; judging people by the color of their skin is “celebrating diversity”; people who smuggled themselves into the country are “undocumented workers”; breaking windows, spray painting walls, screwing in parking lots and shitting in the street is “what democracy looks like”…..moonbat; please.

  4. Oh, and lest I be remiss; accepting a paycheck for spending all day, every day on your employer supplied computer tweeting insanity is “Academic Freedom”.

  5. When it comes to legislation, I always say, “He who names a thing seals its fate.” The GOP needs to do a better job of attaching disastrous monikers to disastrous legislation. Imagine if they had succeeded in (truthfully) labeling Obamacare “total government takeover of your health care”?

  6. Swiftee:

    Close. But it should be: “Oh, and lest I be remiss; accepting a paycheck for spending all day, every day on your employer U of M-supplied computer tweeting insanity is “Academic Freedom””

    Glad we could clear that up.

  7. J Ewing;

    Great point! I think that we should whenl libturds oppose Right to Work, we should tell them that they are disenfranchising other workers!

  8. There is a game I play. Whenever I read a story in the St Paul paper about the proposed iron mine in northern Wisconsin (which Democrats killed as a way to keep jobs out of Wisconsin), I like to guess which paragraph will use the work “pristine”. Its quite easy. That is an example of where one side gets control of the language or words used.

    And saying “marriage equity” instead of “changing the 3,000 year old definition of marriage to include homosexuals”.

  9. Harvard-educated President Obama is universally considered “elite,” while Yale-educated George W. Bush is considered “down home.
    Bush got his MBA from Harvard, not Yale.
    The question Klausen should be asking herself is how the heck could the Right control language when the Left controls the academy, public education, the arts, and the media.

  10. Abortion: Pre-natal intervention performed as a means of maintaining a woman’s health. (Intervention is healthy, right? The mother’s health is fortified by not having to carry a child in her womb. The baby has no vote, but the baby is merely an inviable mass of tissue).

    Copywriting is easy stuff if you’re willing to jettison truth.

  11. Also remember that demanding students pay back their loans is crippling the economy. If we just forgave all student debt the economy would boom… no I’m not kidding people actually think this.

  12. Prediction, Ben: Obama’s strategy will be to propose forgiving student loans and, as a final ploy before election day, to open up the Canadian pipeline. It will come too late for the environmentalists to have an effective snit. It will be a ‘wink and nod’ move, as he would immediately change his thinking if he gets (choke, gasp, gag) re-elected.

  13. TBS; oh it gets better, its already proposed, the student loan forgiveness act, I shit you not
    http://signon.org/sign/support-the-student-loan?source=s.tw&r_by=2939711
    As for the Keystone Pipeline I disagree, he would rather be a ‘great’ one term president than a ‘good’ two term president. He’d rather go down fighting for causes he believes in than get re-elected. Ironically this puts him opposite big labor so this is going to get very interesting.

  14. Obama favors . . . yeah, but will actually happen?

    The “compromise” for Catholics offered by the President was hot air. The final regs enacted by his administration codified the original law. Student loan forgiveness will be the same – pious platitudes without legal force.

  15. Yep, pull a trillion dollars in assets out of the U.S. economy. On top of that make it impossible for future young people to get a student loan. That’ll work.
    Instapundit says that the solution is to make post-secondary schools responsible for a piece of a defaulted student loan. That would probably help medium and long term. It would also eventually shrink the budgets of a lot of humanities departments.

  16. Terry like I said, they don’t look past stage one. It sounds like a good idea (sort of) but like you said that pulls out $1 Trillion out of the economy I’m pretty sure there might not be any private banks left, although that is ultimately the goal of this administration I think. If Obama is still in office on Jan 21st 2013 the market will go down faster than Sandra Fluke goes down on guys on the weekend.

  17. Of course, let’s just ignore the fact that the generous pay and benefits packages that the “professors” in our colleges get, contributes to those increases in costs. God forbid one of them wouldn’t be allowed to take their one, two or three year paid vacations, aka sabbaticals!

  18. Ben, I’ll go one step farther than you. I’ll place $5 on a bet that if Obama wins this year, there won’t be a presidential election in 2016.

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