As Snowden & Geenwald's story falls apart, the GOP has their next scandal lined up.

[ljm2002]

40. I have been hoping for many years now...

...that Democrats would figure out how to control the narrative, so they could outflank the Republicans instead of letting them always frame the arguments.

Finally, some Democrats seem to have gotten the hang of it: You include special qualifying phrases in your reports, that subtly express your opinion without it being obvious. You make sure it is all part of a larger narrative, so you only have to salt your stories and headlines with a couple of code words to dredge up the narrative that has been planted. That sort of thing.

This headline has all the elements:

As Snowden & Geenwald's story falls apart, the GOP has their next scandal lined up

First, you have the lead-in: "As Snowden & Greenwald's story falls apart"

Says who? There are critics, to be sure; but Greenwald has responded to much of the criticism. Furthermore, many of Snowden's claims have not even been denied. The strongest technical challenge to the Greenwald story is the notion of the NSA having "direct access" to company's servers. But this is not really much of a challenge at all. See Greenwald's latest for details:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-partisanship-propaganda-prism

Next, you have: "the GOP has their next scandal lined up"

And there is the narrative, that some hope will be bought hook, line and sinker: that the whole NSA surveillance scandal is just one of the many GOP attempts to smear President Obama. And like any good made-up narrative, there is a grain of truth, so it is easier to plant the narrative in people's minds. Yes, it is true, the GOP is lining up scandals as best they can. But is this one of them? Unlikely. First, you need to look at who is on which side of this issue. It is really very interesting. There are conservative Republicans supporting Obama on this, there are liberal Democrats opposing Obama on this. There are far right Republicans opposing Obama on this, and there are centrist Democrats supporting Obama on this.

In other words, this story does not fall neatly along the ideological lines we are used to in present-day politics. So even if someone, somewhere, pushed this story in order to discredit Obama (for which I have seen zero evidence), it has gone way, way beyond that.

Okay. Now that we've got the hang of this narrative thing, let's try to use it to push true narratives, not false ones, m'kay?