Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to it's a deliberate reframing

We've been framed!
ER — (archived)

It makes sense, "Republican" is value-free, it's merely the name of an organizing principle, almost an administrative concept. "Democratic" has all kinds of positive emotional loadings. Now that you point it out, I realize I suspected something like this all along, I just wasn't able to articulate it. It's similar to substituting "progressive" for "liberal" or "socialist", now that those have become dirty words. It's no wonder the Right gets so steamed by "progressive". The opponents of progressives must be opposed to progress, right? Isn't language wonderful?

The funny thing is, the cleverer people get at using these kind of rhetorical tricks the more obvious it becomes that they are more wedded to ideology than they are to results.

I miss the days when Eugene McCarthy and Barry Goldwater could be close personal friends in spite of deep differences in politics. Incidentally, JFK and Goldwater were also friends. There's a story that Goldwater, a talented amateur photographer, presented JFK with a handsomely framed portrait (of Kennedy) as a gift. The latter sent him back a thank-you note saying something like "...thank you very much, and best of luck in the career for which have obviously shown so much promise, photography."

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