Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics
BERKELEY – With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.
I can just see the Democratic Party members slapping themselves in the head and saying
Use language to communicate! Jeebus, it’s so obvious now! Thanks, Professor! Oh, and Tom - tell the mimes that they’re outta here.
The only real question is, why didn’t the VRWC oppressively silence this guy before he revealed such a deep secret?
Lots of Big Media badness today:
Carol Williams’ 10/25 story draws an analogy to the invasion of Iraq—does its best to leave the impression that the 1983 American takeover may have been responsible for the death of charismatic leftist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Williams’ piece does note that “hard -line Marxist rivals” deposed Bishop before the invasion. But then it says that “he and his allies were killed six days later” and adds vaguely that “grave doubts remain about who ordered and conducted the executions.” The photo caption in the print edition actually says “Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others were killed in October 1983, after the U.S. invaded.” [Emphasis added.] …
In fact, Bishop is universally reported to have been killed on October 19, 1983, five days after the internal coup against him but six days before the U.S. invaded on October 25. As for who killed Bishop, does Williams have any evidence that disputes the conventional account, accepted on the left and right and backed by witnesses, that Bishop was killed by Grenadan soldiers serving a hard-line faction of Bishop’s own leftist New Jewel movement—the crime for which Bishop’s New Jewel rival Bernard Coard has been convicted and imprisoned? All Williams offers to support the “grave doubts” about this basic account is the statement of … Bernard Coard, who “intimated” to her in a prison interview that “the executions were the work of two Grenadian quislings of the CIA.”
Has the LA Times simply abandoned the practice of obtaining facts in order to write news reports?