The Great Frame Job

Gosh, Dems, I'd enjoy being sold up the river by you if you'd just frame it right! Right Wing News has more.

excerpt:

There are three reasons that Democrats love the concept of "framing" so much.

The first is that there is something to it, it's not all hooey. You can take a rock, put it in a box, and sell about 3 of them by calling it "A rock I found in my back yard," or you can do what one man did, take that same stone, name it "The Pet Rock," and make millions. How an issue or product pitch is framed does make at least some difference.

The second thing that excites Dems about "framing" is that it doesn't require them to abandon any of their ideological goals. The idea being that the public hasn't rejected their policies, it's that the Dems just haven't been able to find the right "frame" for them yet.

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Third, Democrats have a tendency to believe that most Americans are gullible idiots and view "framing" as an easy way to trick them. Don't take my word for it, just read what George Lakoff had to say about it:

"According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ''activated'' by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

This notion of ''activating'' unconscious thought sounded like something out of ''The Manchurian Candidate'' (''Raymond, why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?''), and I asked Lakoff if he was suggesting that Americans voted for conservatives because they had been brainwashed.

''Absolutely not,'' he answered, shaking his head.

But hadn't he just said that Republicans had somehow managed to rewire people's brains?

''That's true, but that's different from brainwashing, and it's a very important thing,'' he said. ''Brainwashing has to do with physical control, capturing people and giving them messages over and over under conditions of physical deprivation or torture. What conservatives have done is not brainwashing in this way. They've done something that's perfectly legal. What they've done is find ways to set their frames into words over many years and have them repeated over and over again and have everybody say it the same way and get their journalists to repeat them, until they became part of normal English."

See? The American people aren't "rational actors" and they don't understand "facts." Instead, the population is full of drooling morons who have to be taught to believe the right things by their liberal betters. But unfortunately, the evil Republicans have gotten to the sheeplebots first and have rewired their circuits...for EVIL!

Of course, Lakoff and all the Democrats who are getting so excited about "framing" are missing the tinfoil hat wearing, talking donkey who's sitting in the middle of the living room asking if anyone else thinks the Bush Administration hired Osama Bin Laden to knock down the Twin Towers:

It's the ideas, stupid!

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What the Democrats who're latching onto "framing" don't get is that you can take a big old mound of horse cr*p, put a layer of icing on it and call it a chocolate cake, but you aren't going to fool many people, and those you do trick aren't going to be real happy with you after they take that first bite.

Lots of other great stuff in the post.