Rush tipped us off to this one:

As Democrats continue their post-election soul-searching, a new guru is emerging. He isn't an internet whizz-kid [sic] or a campaign strategist, but a bearded Berkeley linguist who says he knows why Republicans keep winning. George Lakoff says it all comes down to "frames" the mental structures people use when they think about words. Conservatives are masters of framing, using expressions such as "tax relief" to shape the debate to their advantage, he says. If Democrats could do the same, they would perform much better at the polls.

Yet another example of the left's peculiar habit for projection, like its revision of the 1990s as a time of "Clinton hatred" — not a modern era of destructive politics leaving a wake of damaged careers from the White House Travel Office staff to Kenneth Starr. We're to believe that Democrats have suddenly discovered the art of rhetoric: this from the party that euphemized abortion as "freedom of choice"; any deviance whatsoever as a "lifestyle choice"; the abdication of Christianity in public as "sensitivity"; socialized medicine as "universal health care"; rogue states as "states of concern"; the top half of wage-earners paying 95% of taxes as honoring a "fair share"; activist jurisprudence as addressing a "living, breathing document"; an evasion of the national security debate as a focus on "kitchen table issues"; fourteen months of Franco-Russo-rigged debate on top of twelve feckless, faithless years of diplomatic diddling as "a rush to war"; and a thirty-nation coalition as a "go-it-alone" strategy.

The Democratic Party suffered its most stunning defeat yet in a running series, and its leaders are flocking to a theorist who might as well have held a seminar on a revolutionary, flat, circular object that, when paired perpendicularly to a horizontal axle, aids the flatbed transport of people and goods. The denial of Republicans' growing appeal to America on substance and character alone dovetails with leftists' inability to honestly diagnose their own failures; it's part New Age, quick-fix medicine, part paranoid schizophrenic taking a course on abnormal psychology. This is a party going nowhere.

WAY BACK WHEN: Ed Driscoll adds a little background.