Ramping up the rhetoric

As the sand slips through the hourglass, the fear that aWol might not get to start another war with Iran is palpable and his rhetoric becomes increasingly shrill and disconnected from reality.

On Wednesday, Bush conducted an interview with the U.S. government run Farsi-language Radio Farda to mark the Iranian New Year. In that interview, Bush asserted that Iran has openly "declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He also insisted that the Iranian government might be hiding a secret program (in spite of a total lack of evidence to support the allegation.)

There is just one problem - it's pure unadulterated bullshit. A veritable tour de farce.

Iran has never staked any such claim, or even stated on the record a desire for nuclear weapons as a deterrent. The Iranian government has been quite adamant and insisting that the uranium enrichment program that it currently operates in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.

Bush repeated his position that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power, but insists that they should get the low-enrichment fuel from Russian rather than conduct their own refinement, but Tehran has repeatedly rejected that option. "The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?" said Bush. "Secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it's unacceptable to the world." (emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iran has denied repeatedly that the country seeks nuclear warheads, and in 2005, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a religious edict forbidding the "production, stockpiling and use of such weapons."

Shortly after the White House released the transcript of the interview on Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe was on the hotseat and spinning so furiously that he threatened to generate his own gravitational field, dismissing the presidents remarks as "shorthand" for comments allegedly made by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the "World Without Zionism" conference in 2005, where he supposedly, by one translation of his remarks, stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map." People who actually speak Farsi have said unequivocally that the comments that this administration is determined to hang their "bomb Iran" policy from are vague and should not be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.

As their grip slips, as they lose control of the message, their desperation grows by leaps and bounds. The thoroughly diseased, discredited and debunked Neocon/PNAC political philosophy and agenda rooted in arrogance and hubris that has brought our country to the brink of disaster is increasingly viewed as an uncomfortable embarrassment to the less stupid among the craven fucks who subscribed to it. The few die-hards remaining are the most dangerous of the lot - all that is left are the cornered animals. And the psychotic desperation - and flat-out, pathological delusions - of the worst president ever grow every day. It's time to put impeachment back on the table.

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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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