Jeff Goldstein is brilliant at pointing out that if you capture the language, you win the debate.

But as with the surrendering of meaning to the interpretive community—however pragmatic it may seem at the time to do so (and businesses, let’s remember, will nearly always take the road of least resistance)—the danger lies in the tacit acceptance of the premise itself. Which is why I’ve argued, for instance, that when the White House or Bill Kristol, eg., criticize Bill Bennett for not being more circumspect about how his words “about” Blacks and abortion are likely to be taken out of context by those whose agenda it is to “prove” the underlying racism at the heart of conservative ideology, they are actually doing conservatism a disservice; that is, they have decided to trade pragmatic expedience and problem-avoidance for the more difficult task of standing their ground and debating the points on their merits (in Bennett’s case, conservatives should have been insisting that he did nothing wrong, and that those who elected to interpret what he said incorrectly should learn to read and process analogies with the same expertise that they are able to suss out racism from the most benign of utterances, Britt Hume’s “spearchucker” included).