Bush threatens to veto Defense Department budget, unless torture continues to be allowed

Bush has threatened to veto the Defense Department's $442 budget for next year if amendments are added which would forbid or limit torture, increase Congressional oversight of detainee treatment, or sets up a commission to investigate conditions in his international system of gulags.

New York Times reporter attempts an article on framing, but gets spun by spin doctor

Matt Bai has an interesting article in the New York Times, discussing "framing" of issues, which is one of the tools Congressional Democrats, of late, have used to regain a modicum momentum in the public eye.

The article deals with the way leading members of the Democratic Party have implemented, or at least, debated, the assertions of U.C. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. A terrific read, it takes the reader inside the recent successes by the Democrats in scuttling Bush's plan to destroy Social Security, and defusing the "nuclear option" that Republicans were threatening regarding court confirmations.

The theory of framing has to do with the idea that there are certain paradigms in the mind that people readily respond to, and so by setting up ones political argument along the lines of one of these pre-existing narrative perspectives, the public can successfully be influenced. U.C. Berkeley professor and linguist George Lakoff is described in the article as the "father of framing."

In the 1970's, Lakoff, verging into philosophy, became obsessed with metaphors. As he explained it to me one day over lunch at a Berkeley cafe, students of the mind, going back to Aristotle, had always viewed metaphor simply as a device of language, a facile way of making a point. Lakoff argued instead that metaphors were actually embedded in the recesses of the mind, giving the brain a way to process abstract ideas. In other words, a bad relationship reminds you on an unconscious level of a cul-de-sac, because both are leading nowhere. This results from what might be called a ''love as journey'' frame in the neural pathways of your brain -- that is, you are more likely to relate to the story of, say, a breakup if it is described to you with the imagery of a journey. This might seem intuitive, but in 1980, when Lakoff wrote ''Metaphors We Live By,'' it was considered fairly radical. ''For 2,500 years, nobody challenged Aristotle, even though he was wrong,'' Lakoff told me, sipping from a goblet of pinot grape juice. Humility is not his most obvious virtue.
...
The most compelling part of Lakoff's hypothesis is the notion that in order to reach voters, all the individual issues of a political debate must be tied together by some larger frame that feels familiar to us. Lakoff suggests that voters respond to grand metaphors -- whether it is the metaphor of a strict father or something else entirely -- as opposed to specific arguments, and that specific arguments only resonate if they reinforce some grander metaphor. The best evidence to support this idea can be found in the history of the 2004 presidential campaign. From Day 1, Republicans tagged Kerry with a larger metaphor: he was a flip-flopper, a Ted Kennedy-style liberal who tried to seem centrist, forever bouncing erratically from one position to the other. They made sure that virtually every comment they uttered about Kerry during the campaign reminded voters, subtly or not, of this one central theme. (The smartest ad of the campaign may have been the one that showed Kerry windsurfing, expertly gliding back and forth, back and forth.) Democrats, on the other hand, presented a litany of different complaints about Bush, depending on the day and the backdrop; he was a liar, a corporate stooge, a spoiled rich kid, a reckless warmonger. But they never managed to tie them all into a single, unifying image that voters could associate with the president. As a result, none of them stuck. Bush was attacked. Kerry was framed.
According to Lakoff, Republicans are skilled at using loaded language, along with constant repetition, to play into the frames in our unconscious minds.

Later in the article, reporter Matt Bai pays a visit to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who feigns to politely dismiss Lakoff, while in fact using Lakoff's techniques to reframe the debate:

On a recent morning in his Virginia office, seated next to one of those one-way glass walls that you find only in the offices of cops and pollsters, Frank Luntz explained why George Lakoff and his framing theory were leading the Democratic Party astray. In recent years, Luntz's penchant for publicity -- he is a frequent commentator on cable television -- has earned him no small amount of scorn and ridicule from fellow Republicans; that Lakoff's little book had suddenly elevated Luntz to a kind of mythic villain seemed to amuse him. ''In some ways, the Democrats appreciate me more than the Republicans do,'' Luntz, 43, told me with a trace of self-pity.

The problem with Lakoff, Luntz said, is that the professor's ideology seemed to be driving his science. Luntz, after all, has never made for a terribly convincing conservative ideologue. (During our conversation, he volunteered that the man he admired most was the actor Peter Sellers, for his ability to disappear into whatever role he was given.) Luntz sees Lakoff, by contrast, as a doctrinaire liberal who believes viscerally that if Democrats are losing, it has to be because of the words they use rather than the substance of the argument they make. What Lakoff didn't realize, Luntz said, was that poll-tested phrases like ''tax relief'' were successful only because they reflected the values of voters to begin with; no one could sell ideas like higher taxes and more government to the American voter, no matter how they were framed. To prove it, Luntz, as part of his recent polling for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, specifically tested some of Lakoff's proposed language on taxation. He said he found that even when voters were reminded of the government's need to invest in education, health care, national security and retirement security, 66 percent of them said the United States overtaxed its citizenry and only 14 percent said we were undertaxed. Luntz presented this data to chamber officials on a slide with the headline ''George Lakoff Is Wrong!!''

''He deserves a lot of credit,'' Luntz said of Lakoff. ''He's one of the very few guys who understands the limits of liberal language. What he doesn't understand is that there are also limits on liberal philosophy. They think that if they change all the words, it'll make a difference. Won't happen.''

From that point on in the article, Bai becomes much more wary of Lakoff's theories, and returns again and again to the suggestion that liberals are merely trying to change the terms of the debate in order to win, because they supposedly have no new ideas. For some reason, however, Bai neglects to condemn the Republicans for now only having no new ideas, but actually spending all their efforts trying to return us to the era when robber-barrons domineered the world, unchallenged.

In fact, it is Bush who's out of step with the priorities of American citizens, but it would be unlike Luntz to admit that.

In essence, then, Luntz expertly re-framed the debate by spinning the reporter, while denying the efficacy of the framing technique itself, and its architect. It's a clever maneuver, but it's also terribly deceptive.

Luntz also begs the question when he says no liberal priorities can ever be successfully sold, because the majority of citizens oppose increasing taxes. Luntz fails to mention that there are other ways to provide revenue for progressive priorities, such as by re-allocating existing govenment revenues.

To show you how far out of touch Bush and the Republicans are with the spending priorities of Americans, let's look at how U.S. citizens would adjust the way their taxes are spent.

For details, check out a recent study from the University of Maryland (see the pdf files of the press release, or the whole thing) that shows Americans' priorities include spending more to reduce the deficit, more on education, more on energy conservation and development of renewable resources, more on job training and employment, more on medical research, and more on veteran's benefits. The same study reveals people want to spend less on defense, less on supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, less on transportation, less on the Justice Department, and less on the space program.

65% of respondents would approve of a 15% reduction in defense spending, in exchange for more spent on education, healthcare, housing, and deficit reduction.

What kind of spending would people like to see in the international arena? More for the UN and UN peacekeeping, more for military aid, more for humanitarian and economic aid, and more for the State Department.

A majority (65%) would also like to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear war capabilities. 62% would like to see a reduction in spending toward new types of nuclear weapons.

Perhaps a successful strategy for the Democratic Party would be to build a platform around what the people actually want, and then use their new-found rhetorical ninja skills to help explain what they're doing in America's soundbite-fueled mediasphere.

(Edited for clarity).

Scotty the Duck

Thanks to the Mike Malloy Show on Air America for this one!

Are Voters Idiots? At Least One Republican politician Has Said He Thinks So!

Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Assemblyman Willis Stephens inadvertently sent a note to an online discussion group, which he intended only to send to an aide, in which he referred to his participation in the online forum this way "Just watching the idiots pontificate."