Frank Luntz says that invoking the “war on terror” set up the conditions for an electoral win by Bush. “If the public sees what the president’s doing as a war on terror, he wins. If they see it as a war on Iraq, Kerry wins. What is the context of what the president is doing? Define it one way, you have one outcome; define it another way, you have a different outcome.”

In this struggle to control political reality through language, you don’t dispute specific words or rebut the facts; you don’t even attack your opponents’ frames. What you do is assert your side’s frame, making it so big, so omnipresent, so unavoidable that it’s as natural as talking about the roundness of the Earth. Disputing such a fact seems counterintuitive. Even heretical.