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just to say the wholly obvious:
the bush administration obviously sees its problems over their fine and wildly successful colonial outing in iraq as a function of image problems--disadvantageous terms of debate, you see (nothing wrong with the policy, the claims about iraq the torture, etc etc etc)--os it is that suicide bomber is bad bad bad because it focuses on the bomber and assigns a motive rooted in sacrifice--homicide bomber---which is not pleasing aesthetically and so can be seen as another botched semantic design by the right----this term would switch the associations
if you figure that folk organize most of their idea of what is happening in iraq based on passing encounters with information, quick reads, tv over other acts of comsumption, etc, so the terminology plays a bigger role in shaping whole perceptions of and positions on the war than it would if folk read more carefully or watched more closely or something
this seems to me like a set of assumptions that would make the term switch a reasonable tactic---and it is not unreasonable from another angle--if folk really paid attention to information, really read or watched carefully and thought about what they took in, george w bush would never have been selected in the first place---so it makes sense that this administration would work with patronizing assumptions about "the amurican people" and their relation to information...
it's another example of what the redon group does--like the thread about the word insurgent---the administration hired these folk on to address their "image crisis" and this is an element of the response. it will be vaguely interesting to see if this aesthetically unpleasant foxterm leaks beyond the confines of conservativeland.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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