If you tell someone “X is not caused by Y”, when that person never previously associated X and Y, you’ll confuse at least some of them into forgetting the “not”.

When I played sports in my youth my coaches always told us to tell ourselves things like “I will make this shot” and NEVER “I will not miss this shot” because the “not” gets lost and the brain ‘hears’ “I will … miss this shot”.

seems like it was good advice.

- Tom

Imagine that you read the following sentence in some text (if you’re a humanities graduate student you of course call it a “text”):

Thomas Jefferson was not a homosexual.

The surface meaning of this statement is that Thomas Jefferson was not a homosexual. But you’d never before heard anyone claim otherwise, and with the Sally Hemmings story you certainly never thought otherwise before reading this statement. So why does this sentence appear?

The deconstructionist would point out that the author is implicitly introducing the statement that Jefferson was a homosexual into the discourse.

If you tell someone “X is not caused by Y”, when that person never previously associated X and Y, you’ll confuse at least some of them into forgetting the “not”.

Or repeat the truth over and over and over. That would be hard because we are talking about politicians.

1. Be first on the attack (law of primacy)
2. If you must restate, re-brand
3. Most important, repeat, repeat, repeat and while you’re at it get some others to repeat for you.

Don’t you see all of these things in what the repugnicons do every day?

BTW, you can’t do number one if you fall for the “running a nice campaign” myth.

Anyone have any better ideas? Ideas that will work for bloggers?

Pardon me if I’m missing the obvious, but isn’t the source of the problem with the various proposed responses the fact that they’re all initiated as responses? Rather than give the GOP’s idiotic claims currency through repetition or reference, why not just lay out our own case, something like this:

Here’s the situation.
Here’s the series of GOP policies (if that’s the term for them) that led to this situation.
Here’s why they don’t work.
Here’s the logical approach that will work.

Break it down into bite-sized chunks that people can digest (perhaps present it via ads in serial form—a bit at a time). Reinforce it with visuals (TV is an affective, visual medium after all). Repeat, repeat, repeat. Spend at least a week on each chunk. Sell it like soap. We need to acknowledge the attributes of the media we have to rely on to get the message across & use it to our advantage.

Or am I missing the point?

The form of the counterclaim is as follows: ‘that person made claim X in order to harm people in Y fashion.’ The counterclaim envelops the faulty claim but places it in a larger context such that what is remembered is the counterclaim. Then keep repeating the counterclaim so as to reframe the debate.