This Sums Up My Thoughts on 'Framing'

By way of a very good post about the Tea Parties by Amanda, I came across this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the NAACP's call to the Tea Partiers to renounce the racists in their midst:

I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like "it's worth saying" and "it strikes me that..." or "respectfully..."

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it's worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.

I don't really fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. To the extent that I lash into someone, I do so because they have a long track record, sometimes decades long, of idiocy. And that idiocy should be stated precisely, not civilly. People who repeatedly espouse stupid ideas, despite evidence to the contrary, deserve only the respect properly due to those ideas--which is to say, none at all.