Lakoff is right about one thing, at least. Words are important, and Kerry didn't have a clue how to use them.

But to think that this is anything other than a slight tactical shift is laughable. As is Lakoff's bizzare psychoanalysis of "poor conservatives," and pretty much everything else.

This proves it. I'm a dupe. If it weren't for their crafty, magic words, I'd surely have seen the light and voted for the Jr. Senator from Mass. Just a brain-washed dupe I am. Geez!

I keep on reading that voting Republican goes against people's economic self-interest. Can someone please explain to me the logic behind the thinking of people who say that?

Not to mention that Kerry did use "A Stronger America" on his bumper stickers, and nobody had any idea what he was talking about.

Just one more example supporting A.O.G.'s liberal logo-realism thesis.

There's a good critique of Lakoff here.

I didn't read Lakoff's book Moral Politics, but I flipped through it and remember Lakoff using President Bush's famous revokation of arsenic standards in drinking water to illustrate his argument. Never mind all the obvious rejoinders: that the current restriction was ridiculously low, that instituting such an expensive policy would cause people to retreat to local wells with their unsafe water, that Clinton waited six years before putting the policy into place at the tailend of his term, thus forcing Bush to deal with the stink he made, etc. The entire book, it appeared to me, relied on that kind of slipshod argumentation.

I also read a review of the book that noted a Lakoff remark from that book expressing surprise that conservatives considered the Soviet Union "evil" and not just "inefficient." Typical.

Lakoff also by saying that liberals were drawn to the academy because "Unlike conservatives, [liberals] believe in working for the public good and social justice." Uh huh.

I say, this mightily risible. This turkey is saying that the conservative side has been so brilliant as to manipulate the meaning of words and change to way people's minds work--sort of like Karl Marx meets Sapir-Whorf.

Keep in mind that those people think conservatives are stupid, but not so stupid that we haven't figured out how to transform the human brain by linguistic slight-of-hand. That's just too gay.

This is all part of the leftist whole cloth. The pinko response to their lastest electoral catastrophe has been to declare that what they need is more manipuation of the symbol-system. Of course, this is pathetic, as their cause has fallen so far, especially since the demise of the motherland of socialism, that the public is on to them. Now, the more they try to play with language, the more desperate and duplicitious they are exposed to be. We all know that calling a tail a leg does not "transform" the quadruped. It does however, mark the declarant as one not to be trusted.

By repetition of language, they have actually changed people's brains . . .

Aiiieeeee! Republican mind control beams! Tinfoil is no defense against them!

Use of imagery and language is obviously important in politics. However, the Republicans would not have been able to achieve results unless the Democrats were fundamentally not able to meet the needs of these voters, many of whom were at one point loyal Democrats. Only consistent abandonment of these voters would make them susceptible to being reliable Republican voters.

The problem with the Democrats is not that they have a superior product, but inferior marketing. It's that the product itself is considered inferior because the brains behind the Democrats have designed the product to appeal to a select group inside the Democrats instead of to the people who actually voted for it.

The rots been in the party ever since 1968.

Lakoff's star will dim as soon as more Democrats figure out what the Brothers Judd already know: that the man is a snake-oil salesman of the first rank.