Tag: language

One of the keys to the political victories Republicans consistently rack up, despite all they've done to destroy the country, is their brilliant, very deliberate use of language to frame issues in ways that make it hard for them to lose arguments. 

Who could be for a "death tax"?  Who could ever want to send their money -- "the people's money, not the government's money" to be squandered by "faceless bureaucrats"? Who, except an enemy of the country, could be against a "Patriot Act"?

Repubs know that he who frames the argument wins the argument. 

I've written before about how Repubs have been very successful in stopping climate change legislation, partly through their brilliance in always referrring to such legislation by the bloodless, mechanistic term "cap and trade".   In such a term, you don't see the folks who lost their homes in North Dakota because of flooding, or the victims of the monster tornadoes in Alabama and elsewhere, or the Somali famine survivors or the polar bears disappearing from the face of the Earth. 

No, the term makes me think of a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in a vast room continually pushing and pulling on some enormous Rube Goldberg contraption. But here's the funny part -- the Repubs are now pulling the same trick for opposite purposes in calling their budget balancing bill "cut, cap and balance". 

Why are they using the bloodless, bureaucratic term here? Simple: because they don't want you to visualize the consequences of actually reducing the federal budget to Eisenhower-era levels.