Entries from December 2004 ↓
December 22nd, 2004 — why, daddy?
So, I saw a cover of a ‘Complete Idiot’s guide to Knowledge Management’ today, and I thought “why isn’t there one to foreign policy?” I mean, the world’s biggest idiot is allegedly in charge of this right now?
So here’s a first crack at the cover…any additional/replacement text for the front cover gratefully received.
Oh and I found the ‘Complete Idiot’s guide to World Conflicts’ when I looked on Amazon – unexpected and a bit of a jolt really – it’s probably the association of the brand with less, um, weighty matters, like mp3 players and time management.
December 15th, 2004 — impolite company, the web-wide world
Condolences to former Vice President Al Gore and family on the death of his mother, Pauline. She had a pretty amazing life: one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1936, wife of a US Representative and US Senator, mother of a US Senator and Vice President. In a just world, she’d have been helping her son prepare for his second term as President…
December 15th, 2004 — impolite company
Dear Axis of Evil nations,
We are having some trouble with our missile defense program — no, its nothing new; its just the same problems we’ve been having for 20 years now. It seems that we can actually hit our targets 5 times out of 8, but only when the weather is clear over our launch center in Kodiak, Alaska, and only when the attacking missile doesn’t shoot decoys and carries a homing device. Y’know: real-world scenarios.
Anyway, until we get this all worked out, we’d appreciate if you would give us some advance notice of an attack. A couple of days would be best, but we could probably make do with as little as 24 hours. It would also help if you give us both the coordinates of the launch pad as well as the coordinates of the target, exact time of launch, projected trajectory, etc. In fact, since we’re currently wasting about US$85 million each time we “Cheney” up, we’d certainly be open to some discussion about cash incentives for you to just blow up your own missiles out in space and let us take the credit for it. Think about it, okay? And you can leave any response in the comments to this or any of the big lefty blogs. Big John Ashcroft is still with us for a little while, yet and it really makes his eagle soar when he can spend his time spying on the lefties and avoiding all that embarassing prosecution-type work.
So, thanks from all of us here in the “Red, White and Red” United States of America,
W
December 7th, 2004 — impolite company
December 5th, 2004 — impolite company, the web-wide world
From today’s Boston Globe article on the return of the citizenry to Fallujah:
…troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned…
…One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons…
…previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, ” ‘What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?’ All this Oprah [stuff],” he said. “They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.
Then we build a wall around the ghetto, and color-code the badges for easy identification. When the food shortages occur (and they will occur, along with disease), we make sure that rations and medicine are distributed according to importance: “Coalition” soldiers first, Iraqi soldiers next, Fallujan collaborators next, and whatever is left over goes to the riff-raff.
But, at least they’ll have the opportunity to vote.
December 4th, 2004 — impolite company
There’s been a lot of talk in blogs much more important than mine about what the Democratic Party needs to do to come back from this string of defeats in recent elections. One method they keep coming back to over and over again, is “framing”. And the person most associated with this method is George Lakoff. Framing — as far as I understand it — involves creating an overarching metaphor or conception which describes your position and then choosing your language carefully to continually reference that metaphor.
The Republicans, according to many reports have been working on their frame since Barry Goldwater’s defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In the intervening 40 years, they have been systematically honing the basics of their frame, which pictures Government — especially the New Deal and Great Society reforms — as an intrusive, immoral, expensive, inefficient and ineffective force which must be resisted by shrinking it until it can be drowned in the bathtub. Within that frame, they have created such phrases as “right-to-life”, “death tax”, “partial-birth abortion”, “tax and spend liberals”, “healthy forests”, “defense of marriage” and, most recently, “social security privatization.”
The power of frames is that they create such a structure around ideas that even opponents are forced to use a language which helps to defeat them. For instance there’s the phrase “Bush tax cuts”. Googling on that exact phrase brings up about 268,000 items, many of them critical of the program. But think about the term for a moment: even though the vast majority of Americans are finding this legislation actually increases their taxes and expenses, by using the phrase “tax cut” we ourselves are referring to a horrible program with terminology that brings to mind something good. After all, those opposed to tax cuts must be for tax increases and therefore, they’re trying to take my money!
So we need to refer to this program with terminology which shows our approbation by phrasing it as something bad. Even calling it a “Millionaire’s Tax Cut” doesn’t do it because there’s a double good here: “millionaire” = “something I want to be” + “tax cut” = “giving me back more of my money”. A commenter on one of Kevin Drum’s articles about framing suggested “…the Bush Entitlements or Corporate Entitlements…” as a way of phrasing it, which isn’t bad. If we go with a phrase like that we have to understand that we are ceding the term “entitlements” for all time (which may not be a bad idea, since our society’s Calvinist outlook despises the thought that anyone may be entitled to anything) because using these terms agrees with the framing of government support as something bad.
Finding the right frame is going to be difficult, since, as the traditional “Big Tent” party, the Democratic Party is composed of hundreds of often competing interests. But I think we are moving in the right direction when we use terms such as “fairness”, “equality”, “inclusion” (that might be a bad one, according to CBS), and “community”. And when we discuss our opponents, we should use terms such as “ravenous”, “un-neighborly”, “landlords”,”selfish”, “restrictive”, and “heirs and heiresses” — all terms with negative connotations. We need to get onto the debates early and place the issues into our frame before the Republicans, with their parrot-like media accomplices insinuate their take on things.
Josh Marshall has a very good suggestion on these lines: “In the coming Social Security debate, Democrats should dust-off Clinton’s ‘mend it, don’t end it’ rhetoric. ” Clinton was referring to Affirmative Action when he said it, but it applies well here. As Marshall says:
The strength of the Republican privatization argument — and all their rhetoric and strategy point to this — is the contention that privatization is just a reform, a way to improve or save Social Security, or to put it simply, a way to make sure people get their checks when they retire. But what this is really about is abolishing Social Security; and that fact needs to be taken as granted — not even a subject of debate — in the way Democrats frame the debate and how they talk about the subject.
When the debate arises, lets make sure we tell everyone that the Democrats created Social Security because we care about people. The Republicans opposed it then and they want to end it now. We want to mend it, not end it.
