Whose Freedom The Battle over America's Most Important Idea [Paperback]

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word freedom. Al-Qaeda attacked us because they hate our freedom. The U.S. can strike preemptively because freedom is on the march. Social security should be privatized in order to protect individual freedoms. The 2005 presidential inaugural speech was a kind of crescendo: the words freedom, free, and liberty, were used forty-nine times in President Bush's twenty-minute speech.

InWhose Freedom?,Lakoff surveys the political landscape and offers an essential map of the Republican battle plan that has captured the hearts and minds of Americans--and shows how progressives can fight to reinvigorate this most beloved of American political ideas.

About this Guide
The questions and discussion topics that follow are designed to enhance your reading of George Lakoff's Whose Freedom? We hope they will enrich your experience as you explore Lakoff's provocative expos? of the rhetoric that empowers America's conservatives.

Introduction
Hailed by Howard Dean as one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement, George Lakoff is a revered adviser within the Democratic Party, a bestselling author, and a renowned scholar in the field of cognitive linguistics.Whose Freedom?combines all three perspectives for an engaging, authoritative, passionately argued survey of America's war over the word freedom.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has relentlessly invoked the word freedom, using it to justify everything from preemptive strikes on Iraq to the privatization of Social Security. Yet many Democrats see President Bush's use of the word as meaningless and opportunisticand ultimately leading to the curtailment of the very freedoms he claims to support.Whose Freedom?reveals the ways in which language and repetition in the media have been used to enact a devastating, calculated redefinition of freedomló@