I agree with this from Lindsay:
Calling Michelle Malkin “a cunt” is the equivalent of calling the Republicans “the party of big government”–a terrible rhetorical move whether it’s deserved or not. “Big government” is a Republican frame that Democrats have to counter with a better frame of their own. Fighting about who’s really the party of big government just helps the Republicans by reinforcing their way of looking at taxes and the state.
We in the netroots pay a lot of attention to the language Democrats use to sell their proposals. The George Lakoff framing enthusiasm, which I think may be mercifully past us, was one of the more dramatic manifestations of this. While I don’t think that Lakoff’s theories really offered us enough that was concrete and useful, the attention they attracted to the questions of how Republicans use language to control the debate, and how we can do so as well, was a good thing.
