Thursday, June 22, 2006

"Occupation, Not War" part deux

Rob Kall of OpEdNews follows up on my yesterday's post:

Every Democratic legislator should be, if necessary, electro-shock trained to never use the term "war" to describe the disaster in Iraq. It's an occupation, a horror story, a testimony to vast incompetence and failed leadership.

And let's dump the "war on terrorism" language too. This language, invented by right wing language gurus, is misleading and only causes us to pursue useless efforts.

You can fight terrorism. You can fight drug abuse. You can put together resources to fight cancer. But when it comes to groups spread across the the planet, in many countries, you can't declare war. You might have skirmishes. But you need to think of different kinds of strategies, more like the ones used to take on organized crime-- the Mafia, Columbian drug smugglers.

The stupid, politically motivated mislabelling of the problem as a war has caused us to waste thousands of US lives tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Bush and his rubber-stamp republican liars and fools (one, the other or both) have idiotically taken us down a path that has no hope of resolving the problem of terrorism.

Democrats who gullibly continue to use the languaging that the Republican spinmeisters crafted to frame things to meet their political needs are being duped and helping the Republicans. The Democrats must take control of the language "war." They must refuse to respond to journalist questions that use that framing.

Let the media attend. Let them learn and understand how the right wing language experts have been using them, so they can tell the difference between being real reporters and media dupes of the right wing. Some media people will continue to use the right wing "language" since they're part of the right wing echo chamber team. Some will see what's really going on and start functioning as real, independent journalists. It will be interesting to see which "journalists" actually "get it."

Journalists? Getting it? Don't hold your breath. The ones who are going to 'get it' at this point mostly already have, but there may be more when some of 'em figure out how badly they've been used, or worse, that they were played for fools and went along with it. Nobody likes being thought of as a fool, even fools. Revenge is a wonderful motive.

Please read the rest of the piece. It was hard to restrain myself from quoting it whole. I think to re-label the war for what it is - occupation - is the best idea to come down the pike in quite a while.

The Repubs are brilliant at exactly one thing: using our language to lie to us, aka piss on yer leg an' tell ya it's rainin'. They've figured out that "simple messages for simple minds" gets them re-elected, even if, no, especially if, they're untrue but sound moral, patriotic, etc. The Repubs play their constituency for fools, and why not? They're suckers, and it works.

What the Dems have to realize is that they have to shitcan the "complex messages on complex issues for rational, reality-based, thinking minds" and come up with a way to condense the truth into a "simple message" aka a "catch phrase" for everybody else.

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