If anyone still needed any evidence that political speech -- public rhetoric intended to legitimate certain courses of actions while ruling out others -- is governed by the demands of social sustainability rather than by the demands of logic, they need look no further than President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday evening. My favorite howler in the speech came near the end, when Bush called for determined commitment by suggesting that...

...20! AB takes the title with a bid of 19. What I find most interesting about the speech is not the number of references to terror (I actually thought it would be a bit higher), but this new reference to the President's critics as "isolationists". Suzzane Nossel has it right when she remarks that this is "pure hogwash" and a "strawman".Clearly the administration is trying to propogate a new frame for their opponents--a clever strategy....

Like Bill, I'm willing to speculate about the content of tonight's "State of the Union" address. However, allow me to guess about what won't be discussed. I'm willing to conjecture that President Bush will ignore a globally crucial issue that close ally Tony Blair considers one of his "top priorities." Monday, the British government released Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, a book outlining the official findings from the Avoiding Dangerous...

Thought we could all have a little fun with the State of the Union tonight. Let's try to guess how many times the President uses a derivative of the word terror (the word itself or words using the root 'terror' must be uttered--implicit remarks do not count). I have listed the tally for the last five SOU below.2001-1 (technically, just an Address of Congress as Rodger points out)2002-372003-232004-212005-28I will start the bidding at 25 (NSA...

It is being reported that the US has secured the consent of all five permanent members of the Security Council to submit the case of Iran for the body's review. However, the US did not secure a Security Council "referal"--which would have given the body domain over the issue--but instead managed to get the findings of the emergency meeting of the IAEA "reported" to the body. Not only that, but the matter will not be taken up by the body until...

An interesting story via Laura Rozen, Andrew Sullivan, and Cunning Realist. According to reports, a series of emails and an internal Army memo suggests that US soldiers have used insurgents' wives as leverage in order to get the suspects to surrender. So far, there has been no confirmation that the detentions actually led to the surrender of the insurgents targeted. There is no mention of explicit threats of violence against the wives which...

Mansfield and Snyder were featured on NPR's Morning Edition today. Have a listen.Filed as: Democratization, Democratic Peace

The world is abuzz this morning with the news that the radical muslim group Hamas has apparently won a majority of seats in the recent parliamentary elections in Palestine. The group which in the past has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' has apparenlty won a a 53% majority of seats in the parliament. Hamas' victory seems due in no small part to the dissatisfaction on the part of Palestinians with the incumbent government and their...

One of the perennial issues for academics, and perhaps especially for academics studying social phenomena (although I can easily see how this would be of concern for those of my colleagues in the physical sciences as well), is the relationship between the issues and topics that we choose to study and the concerns of politicians, bureaucrats, and the electorate as a whole. This is a perennial issue in part because, whether we teach at public or...

I was going through some of last week's dead tree editions of the NY Times and found this in the January 19 edition:Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needed to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change.Speaking on a panel that also included the current agency chief, Stephen L....

Peter Beinart writes in the Washington Post (hat tip: Marc Schulman) about cycles of isolationalism. I tend to cringe whenever I read invocations of "political cycles" in American history, so I was pleasantly surprised to read Beinart's comment that:Such theories, of course, lack social scientific rigor; American foreign policy cannot be set to a clock. But cyclical thinking still subtly frames much public discussion. For President Bush, the...

In a speech last week at a nuclear submarine base in Brittany, French President Jacques Chirac signaled a shift in his country's nuclear doctrine (for coverage see here, here, and here; for hilarity, see Chirol over at Coming Anarchy). The speech outlined the reconfiguration of French doctrine which reflects Chirac's concern with ability of regional powers/actors to threaten French strategic concerns. This shift has been in the works for over a...