Powerful piece from George Lakoff

betterworldheroes.com

It is time to tell an inconvenient truth about Iraq: it is an occupation, not a war.

Our nation has been held trapped in a fallacious War Frame that serves the interests of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. The term “cut and run,” used to vilify Democrats, is defined relative to the following frame:

There is a war against evil that must be fought. Fighting requires courage and bravery. Those fully committed to the cause are brave. Those who "cut and run" are motivated by self-interest; they are only interested in saving their own skins, not in the moral cause. They are cowards. And since those fighting for the cause need all the support they can get, anyone who decides to “cut and run” endangers both the moral cause and the lives of those brave people who are fighting for it. Those who have courage and conviction should stand and fight.

Once the false frame is set, it is hard to use any pure self-interest frame that ignores the just cause of fighting evil. That is the trap the Democrats have fallen into. Their proposed slogans evoke self-interest frames: John Murtha’s “stay and pay and ”John Kerry’s “lie and die” have an X-and-Y structure that evokes, and thus reinforces, “cut and run.”