Frank Lies for a Living

I've wanted to write a detailed and vicious attack on this guy for a long time, but the more I look into him, the more I realize it would take an entire book. Frank Luntz is regarded as a republican whiz kid for his "profound" ability to find out what people want to hear, and then apply those words to products and politics. At best his language softens harsh policies; at worst his language is a straight-up lie (think of the "Clean Air Initiative").

I invite you to read an interview PBS's Frontline conducted with him for the show The Persuaders. It simply makes me furious, and I believe that Luntz and shits like him are the only reason for the neo-cons' success in recent years. Here's a sample to tempt your contempt:

Frontline: Talk to me about the Healthy Forests Initiative of President Bush. Isn't calling it "Healthy Forests" obfuscating the fact that it entails keeping the forests healthy with widespread logging?


Luntz: Yes, the Bush administration benefited from the phrase "healthy forest." But what do we know as a fact? If you allow this underbrush to subsume the forest, to get so thick that you can't walk through it, you can't get through it, if you don't touch a twig or a tree and you say, "Oh, let Mother Nature deal with it," then you get these catastrophic forest fires that we saw in Arizona, Colorado and in California. The Native Americans, they know how to thin a forest, and yes, they do take trees out, and what happens? A fire burns, and it stops right where that thinning process took place. But thanks to environmentalists who are extreme and radical in their approach, who say that we must not touch anything at any time in any way, we lose thousands, thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres of forests and all the wildlife that was inside it. And they don't come back again. It takes generations for it to regenerate. So don't tell me about language, because "healthy forests" actually is what it means. And you have to understand the policy, and you've got to understand the product if you want to be able to communicate it. You can't just approach it naively.

You should really read the entire interview.

Just in case you're swayed by his thoughts on forest fires, you should know that it's a century's worth of total fire suppression that makes forests so susceptible to the dangerous monster fires. Think about it: Luntz is not only suggesting that the Native American’s kept all of America’s forests safe from fire, but that environmentalists are now to blame for them.

Finally, for those of you more in touch with your inner cable viewer, The Daily Show took a really, really nice stab at Luntz. CLICK HERE! (Real Media).