Customer Reviews

Deflating the Elephant: The Framed Messages Behind Conservative Dialogue

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The back cover of this DVD states that "George Lakoff..., a professor of cognitive linguistics...dissects the conservative dialogue and provides explanations and examples on how they spent the last 35 years perfecting their ideas and language."

George does a fair job of this and does give some clear examples and explanations. Unfortunately he deviates from this goal too often and substitutes his own framing of topics rather than stick to clear facts. He commits the same errors of logic that he accuses the conservatives of. Additionally, the material is already dated with his frequent references to the Bush administration in particular instead of conservatives in general.

George would be ok despite these shortcomings, but the periodic ranting by Sean Penn was odd at first but downright embarrassing by the end of the video. I am neutral on Sean, but this video truly made me question his agenda. He seems to have a true hatred of Bush (I was no fan of the Bush administration but thought that Bush the person was doing the best he was capable of). Sean turns a mildly educational video into a far leftwing propaganda piece (suggestion to the producers - re-release this video with Sean completely removed).

Overall I got about 30-40 minutes of good information (at least a well presented point of view) from this 2+ hour video, but felt deceived by the way it was marketed to me.

(Not a very dynamic presentation. George is sitting if front of a map for his portion and never moves. Sean is sitting on a park bench. No fancy graphics or illustrations of the topics they are presenting.)