RW Framing: Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery

You probably don’t even know you do it. And you almost certainly don’t know how much you do it…how deep into your head the Republican BrainWorm has dug.

Or to put it another way, in the legendary Battle for Hearts and Minds…The Republicans may not have won any hearts lol, but they sure did infiltrate a lot of minds.

Karl Rove’s job was not just to win elections, Karl Rove’s job was to to change the lexicon of politics, to change the language….

And by changing the language change the perception…

And by changing the perception of issues….change the way people thought, and by changing the way WE thought, change the way we act.

The aide (Rove) said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do

If you can change the way people THINK about an issue you can…and Rove did…change the way people talk about it and act on it. And it worked.

We are STILL operating in the Republican reality. And the proof of that is that we are still playing defense….defense against Republican born framing and perception on every issue we face.

George Bush and Kral Rove and Dick Cheney changed the way even Liberals think about issues, by imposing their framing, their desired perceptions, on all of us, and on every issue,  for eight years.

Especially…on the Press. And through the Press on all of America. And while the most damaging aspect of that change has been in the way Democratic Politicians think, and thus speak and act…..always on defense, they changed US too.

We are STILL reacting to the reality they created and still thinking about that ‘reality’ in the way they want us to.

We are still defending against the Republican Reality…instead of making OUR own reality.

We are still…despite the fact that their “reality” failed catastrophically ….acting as if their reality is THE reality.

From health care, to the two wars, to immigration and Climate Crisis, the catastrophically failed and discredited and unpopular with voters Republicans are still framing the debate.

And the Left and the Dems are still playing defense on every level.

Not just caring what the failed republicans think….but actually adjusting and changing the way we think and act because of the Republican imposed perception of every issue.

Somewhere in the back of our mind a nagging little voice cries out to us…”What will the Republicans think.”

“How will the Republicans react?”

And the meaning of that voice is….“How can we PRE-compromise to the Republicans?”

In the Dem politicians mind, that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like… We have to GIVE THIS to the Republicans or they will be mad.”

In bloggers minds that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like…. “We can’t have Single Payer or a strong Public Option.”

“We can’t call for an end in Afghanistan.”

“We have to compromise on Coal.”

“We have to use the (demonizing) phrase illegal alien.”

And of course the worst one, the grand daddy of them all, used by both the Polilticians and the Bloggers…..

“We don’t have the votes.”

Well I have a question for us all.

When are WE going to stop living in the Republican Reality?

When are WE going to start imposing OUR reality on them?

Instead of letting them continue to define reality….even after their reality has failed and that failure has cost so much?

Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery…to the republican reality.

It is time to stand up for what WE believe in and stop reacting to and defending against THEIR reality.

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  1. Photobucket

    • Joy B. on September 21, 2009 at 20:49

    Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,

    none but ourselves can free our minds.

    Have no fear for atomic energy,

    none of them can stop the time.

    How long shall they kill our prophets,

    while we stand aside and look?

    Some say it’s just a part of it,

    we’ve got to fulfill the book.

    One of my all-time favorites!

  2. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.  ~Leo Tolstoy

    Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.  ~Victor Hugo

    Faith makes things possible, not easy.  ~Author Unknown

    Faith is raising the sail of our little boat until it is caught up in the soft winds above and picks up speed, not from anything within itself, but from the vast resources of the universe around us.  ~W. Ralph Ward

    Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.  ~Winston Churchill

  3. YES – the Republicans are a fading, dying minority with three decades of abject FAILURE as their loony legacy & with a future ruled by TV & radio circus clowns, a hockey mom with lipstick, a former Vice-Presidential torture advocate, tea baggers, deathers, birthers & outright RACISTS!

    And WE should be entertaining ANY Republican ideas or concerns??? Now THAT is more hilarious that the comic styling’s of Limbaugh or Beck!!!!!!!!!

    ENOUGH of the IDIOCY, this is a time that “demands” INTELLECT!!!!

       

  4. knows no political ideology, dogma or reality with out the mythical filter of right and left, as expressed by our so called two party’s. Our reality goes beyond the political and has been accepted as the way things are according to the pigs. Sorry I don’t buy that this is a Republican reality, if it was it would not be so hard to change. It has been created and sold as inevitable, the American Dream, the best in the world, by all who rule of have a vested interest in the status quo and are hell bent on reaping seeds of nothing but misery and destruction of the very earth all for a twisted sick version of what started out a dream of equality for all…. even that vision is up for grabs by those that would twist it’s intent.

    Sure it was flawed but it recognized that checks and balances were needed on power and that without the common good we cannot progress. How has this morphed into us against them when they are the same. The differences are absurdly similar. Lately I think Jeeze maybe I’m a tea bagger. While I defend public options and hate the ‘drown the government’ there is no line between government and the corporate entities that know no ideology other then profit and destruction.  

    Like the sports teams that no longer have names that are regional or cultural were all just ruled by the corporations who use our political arena to own and extract the maximum profit that can be made. Sorry to be so cynical but the Democrats have offered us nothing but a more polite version of hell.

    Neither party is capable of offering anything that is not the same deal repackaged and called change or reform or reality. What color is reality blue, purple, red? It is not going to be found in political hues but in the reality that that we end up living in .        

     

    • Edger on September 21, 2009 at 21:39

    Hey you, out there in the cold

    Getting lonely, getting old

    Can you feel me?

    Hey you, standing in the aisles

    With itchy feet and fading smiles

    Can you feel me?

    Hey you, don’t help them to bury the light

    Don’t give in without a fight.

    Hey you, out there on your own

    Sitting naked by the phone

    Would you touch me?

    Hey you, with you ear against the wall

    Waiting for someone to call out

    Would you touch me?

    Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone?

    Open your heart, I’m coming home.

    But it was only fantasy.

    The wall was too high,

    As you can see.

    No matter how he tried,

    He could not break free.

    And the worms ate into his brain.

    Hey you, standing in the road

    Always doing what you’re told,

    Can you help me?

    Hey you, out there beyond the wall,

    Breaking bottles in the hall,

    Can you help me?

    Hey you, don’t tell me there’s no hope at all

    Together we stand, divided we fall.

    • jamess on September 22, 2009 at 03:49

    Frames are the word-pictures, that make an Idea “stick”.

    Framing is related to “story telling” but in a much more subtle and direct way. A Frame is more like “the moral” of the Story — a Frame is the take-away point, the Lesson to be Learned.  

    A good Frame, like a good joke, provides a memorable context, so that the “punch line” almost rolls off the page, off the stage, off the couch.

    A good Frame, is a metaphor, for a larger more complex topic.

    Framing — the Final Frontier

  5. Unfortunately, most of the politicians I know, and most of the bloggers I’ve encountered on the ‘net, have.  They refuse to recognize that we are locked in an ideological war, that we are losing, and as a result refuse to even consider doing the things we must in order to win.  They refuse because, when all the bullshit excuses are stripped away, what it all boils down to is that they simply haven’t the stomachs for war.

    This is because the things we must do to win this ideological war are not pleasant.  It means we have to accept, first of all, that we are engaged in such a conflict to begin with.  It means we have to recognize who our friends and allies really are, and most especially, recognize who our enemies are – and that latter recognition means accepting that Obama and the other right-wing Democrats are part of the problem, never the solution, that they will always operate against us.  It means we have to adopt similar in-your-face methods for countering right-wing lies with the truth, so we may properly argue and defend our positions on vital issues.  And it means recognizing that our enemies are not even remotely human, that they are subhuman savages with a depraved, fundamentally evil ideology that think absolutely nothing of resorting to everything – including and especially violence on a scale we don’t like to imagine – to get what they want.

    These truths are difficult for many left-wingers to accept because we like to believe in the inherent goodness of all human beings, and because we prefer to take what we think is the high road, to be better than our enemies.  Sadly, this unwillingness to accept the truth of things is what is killing us.  We cannot afford to be this weak against savages whose only goal is power and whose only restraint is the recognition that even they can only go so far in pressing their evil agenda.  But they’ve been steadily removing even the mild restrictions decorum currently requires of them, and we have to wake up to that before we find ourselves once again having our asses handed to us.

  6. This surrender to right-wing brainwashing also extends to efforts to break the left away from the very organization that is working with Republicans to neutralize us as an organized and effective movement.  By that I mean the constant discouragement from trying to use third parties to help drive Democrats leftward.  Dare suggest supporting third party candidates and we’re threatened with Republican victories, as though the Democrats haven’t spent the last thirty or so years – and especially the last three (give or take a few months) – proving that things are no better under their rule.  This, too, is an example of how brainwashed we on the left have become; we sabotage even our own efforts to reshape the Democratic Party by helping to crush any attempts to reform it from without as well as from within.

  7. go all the way and see how globo-corp buys both of them.

    http://proliberty.com/observer

    Knight of the Fifth Veil

    • hoipoi on September 22, 2009 at 23:47

    Recently, Rick Sanchez-CNN spent time responding to a full-page Fox news ad that claimed CNN did not cover the 9/12 protest. Mr Sanches got upset and ranted that in fact they did. How bizare, i thought. Why did he get so mad at that?

    It was like he just met them.

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