Meet Anne McLeod

Walter Reed is a mess. But everyone is focusing on the wrong mess.

Mold and mildew can be cleaned up. Stained carpets can be replaced. Walls can be painted and structures can be repaired.

But abuse and neglect...That is not so easy to whitewash.

The crass and craven perfidy is staggering in it's scope. Last week, I was very close to flabbergasted when I heard Secretary Harvey state that he hoped the Washington Post was satisfied, having managed to "ruin some careers." (A few decades of being affiliated with the military has made me not so easy to knock over with a feather when I hear of an outrage, if you know what I mean.)

I wanted to go through the radio and do an injury to the feckless coward.

But today, someone else (without my penchant for rhetorically dousing offenders with gasoline and tossing a match on 'em then busting out the s'mores fixin's) delivered a body blow to Harvey that should have knocked the wind out of all the upper brass. Sometimes a defter touch is demanded. Anne McLeod, wife of an injured Iraq War National Guard Soldier had the right tone, timbre and inflection.

The thing of the matter is, Mr. Harvey made a statement the other day that really bothers me. He said he hopes the Washington Post was satisfied because they ruined careers. First, let me come on record by saying, I don’t care about your career as far as anybody that’s in danger. That doesn’t bother me. All I’m just trying to do is have my life, the life that I had and that I know. My life was ripped apart the day my husband was injured, and having to live through the mess that we lived through at Walter Reed has been worse than anything I have ever sacrificed in my life.

Go to Think Progress to watch video of her testimony.

I dare you to watch it and not tear up, even if you have never had any connection to the military.

This is a topic that is not going away. So let's take a page out of the right's playbook, as written by Frank Luntz. When this subject comes up, use these words in framing the debate:

• Abuse
• Neglect
• Suffering
• Cruel
• Heartbreaking
• Disgraceful
• Depraved indifference
• Families
• Inhuman treatment
• Perfidy
  

Those words focus the debate where it belongs:

On beings, not buildings.

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Issue Framing and Exaggerations

One of the biggest problems Democrats have had in terms of pushing an agenda over the last 10 years has been, in my opinion, their inability to frame their issues. Issue framing is probably the most important aspect of successful marketing. Or instance, anti-tax conservatives have always had a serious problem with the Estate Tax. Of course, many of them are super rich, but many of them just disagree with it on principle - these estates were built with wealth that had already been taxed, so the resources should not be taxed when passed down to beneficiaries. However, the Estate Tax has been largely popular amongst the majority of Americans because 1) the vast majority of people are not, nor will they ever be, subject to such a tax, and 2) because Americans tend to approve of progression tax schematics, particularly when the wealth transfer is unearned; i.e. inheritance, lottery winnings, capital gains, etc. To counter this sentiment, anti-tax forces have re-framed the issue from one of economic fairness and the taxing of wealth transfers, to one of liberals trying to tax death. Taxing DEATH. This is, of course, grossly disingenuous. The Estate Tax (or rather, death tax, as some would put it )does not tax death, but rather, taxes a transfer of wealth from one person to another - from one who earned it, to one who did not. The anti-Death tax movement has gained some steam as a result of this re-framing. Fortunately, Washington State voters voted down an initiative which would have done away with our state Estate Tax, the revenues of which are collected from no more than 250 families and which are diverted to public school funding.

Bill O'Reilly has engaged in a re-framing strategy in an effort to mitigate support for programs which are widely considered to be "leftist" programs. Of course, referring to them as "leftist" is ridiculous; something is only as right or as left as they are in relation to the general will of the American moderates, which is to say, the middle 60 percent or so. I would go so far as to say that embryonic stem-cell research is incredibly popular in this country, garnering support well over 60 percent. Many political hacks (as opposed to wonks) try to frame this as a liberal pet project, which is silly, because the vast majority of people support such research. However, by framing the issue in such a way as to make it appear "leftist", conservative forces are able to link it to other, more controversial issues, like abortion or social welfare, or whatever. O'Reilly uses his radio and TV shows to this end pretty constantly. His whole "Culture War" thing attempts to further solidify issues into certain classes as secular-progressive (aka liberal/Democratic) or Traditionalist (aka conservative/Republican). By using a taxonomy which creates dichotomous classes of issues, O'Reilly is able to associate unrelated issues with each other, and thus mitigate support for one issue by focusing on its association with others. He does this primarily with silly language. For instance, he refers to embryonic stem-cell research as "fetal stem-cell research" which is, of course, ridiculous because the stem-cells are not harvested from fetuses, but rather, embryos. He does this to link stem-cell research to abortion in an effort to sway pro-stem-cell-research people who happen to be pro-life away from supporting stem-cell research.

Last night's "Talking Points Memo" on The O'Reilly Factor was a perfect example of how O'Reilly uses issue framing to manipulate how people examine these issues. My good friend Blaine, on his blog over at Dead Journal, has provided an excellent analysis of O'Reilly's segment, and illustrates how O'Reilly uses rhetoric to misrepresent the American left.

Check it out.

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