{"id":6421,"date":"2006-01-24T10:30:18","date_gmt":"2006-01-24T15:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6421"},"modified":"2006-01-24T10:30:18","modified_gmt":"2006-01-24T15:30:18","slug":"whats-in-a-name-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/whats-in-a-name-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in a name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last summer, when the fight over the most conservative of Bush’s judicial nominees was reaching the boiling point, Republicans decided they didn’t like the phrase they had already come up with: the “nuclear option.” It started a protracted, mind-numbing discussion, and media hand wringing, over whether the tactic was the “nuclear option,” the “constitutional option,” “filibuster reform,” or one of the other less-offensive names the GOP could come up with<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What did the name of the tactic have to do with the policy itself? Nothing, but conservatives take advertising pitches seriously — and they know that an unattractive brand name could undermine their goals. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to have another semantics debate<\/a>, this time on warrantless searches.<\/p>\n

“Let me talk about one other program … something that you’ve been reading about in the news lately. It’s what I would call a ‘terrorist surveillance program.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s all about the public relations, isn’t it? The descriptions in news reports about Bush’s “domestic surveillance” program, or his “warrantless spying” program probably didn’t poll well. The White House has a campaign to run here<\/a>, and if there’s one thing the Bush gang appreciates, it’s the importance of carefully-worded slogans. (see “Mission Accomplished,” et al)<\/p>\n

The interesting thing to watch now is to see how news accounts of the controversy change to accommodate the White House’s sloganeering — and how many cries of “liberal bias” we hear if reporters fail to go along with the president’s preferred label.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last summer, when the fight over the most conservative of Bush’s judicial nominees was reaching the boiling point, Republicans decided they didn’t like the phrase they had already come up with: the “nuclear option.” It started a protracted, mind-numbing discussion, and media hand wringing, over whether the tactic was the “nuclear option,” the “constitutional option,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}