So I mentioned a few days ago that I didn’t watch George W.’s State of the Union this year. But I was still very interested in it. So I pulled down the text of the speech and had a read. There were a few things in there that annoyed me, as usual, and a few pleasant surprises such as the bit about reducing our oil dependence. But overall, it reminded me of every other State of the Union address. That got me thinking… are they really all the same, or is it just my perception?
Thanks to the Internet and a wide variety of text hacking tools under Cygwin, I knew I’d be able to find out. I pulled down the text from the SOTU speeches of 2002-2006, plus Bush’s first policy address in 2001. After hacking the heck out of them in a case-independent way, I was able to compare the frequency of the words in each speech. I wasn’t sure I’d find anything interesting. But here are a few of the results.

The first thing I noticed was this arc. While the occurrence of “peace” is pretty random, with a generally upward trend, the use of the word “war” has a pronounced hump. It looks like “war” is going out of vogue. Perhaps the administration thinks they should focus less on the war, since the American public seems tired of it.

There’s a clear predominance of “terror” in general over “Al Qaeda” in particular (note that the use of “Osama” or “Laden” does not add much to this either). It’s interesting to see how “terror” was popular for some time before both “Iraq” and “Al Qaeda” gained strength. This mirrors the slow spin-up to the war with Iraq after September 11. And again you can see that “Iraq” is slowly disappearing from the scene.

But “Iraq” is still quite dominant over other countries. As it should be. On this chart you can see the increase in mentions of “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” that coincide with our wars in those countries. The scary bit is the slow increase in the use of “Iran”. Looks like the “Korea” bump didn’t quite rise to the level of war; how much further up does “Iran” have to go?

Lastly, just a comment on Bush’s speech style. What you can see on this chart is a gradual decline in the use of the word “I”, and an increase in the use of “we”, “our”, and “us”. I think this mirrors Bush’s attitude. When he first got into office, he was The Man, and he was going to take care of things. “I” this, “I” that, etc. As he has matured in his presidency his rhetoric has improved, and he increasingly uses these more encompassing terms. This is an improvement for sure; the question is, is it just an improvement in rhetoric, or an improvement in attitude? I hope the latter. But it’s at least nice to see his speeches improving.
These are just a few thoughts. Nothing earth-shaking, or ground-breaking. Just interesting. Perhaps you would interpret the data differently than I. What do you think?

I’m completely thrashing at work again, and today my IT department got upset at me for accessing our corporate network from a personal machine at home. Argh! I’m just trying to maximize the amount of work I get done by absolutely having no life during the week – is there something wrong with that?
The State of the Union speech is about to start, and while I usually watch it, I think I’ll turn it off. It’s so much easier and quicker to read the speech online afterward. I can’t take all the pauses for applause (appauses?), they drive me nuts. And then all the gratuitous gestures, such as Laura sitting next to a Muslim woman… argh. The whole event seems more like theatre than a useful speech. Does anyone ever really hold our President to account for the promises they made before getting into office? Doesn’t seem so. I have to give props to our mayor in San Francisco for this – check out his two-year “score sheet”, and the accompanying press release. Well done!
Okay: off, television, off!

Lately politics has been really frustrating me. I still listen to a lot of CNN, CSPAN, NPR – probably more than is actually healthy for me. Fortunately, The Daily Show provides a welcome respite. But the rest of them… almost always seem like a complete waste of time when I think about what I’m listening to.
I like to know what’s going on, which is why I listen to these things. But 80% of the material is either a) not actually relevant to me, or b) simply an opportunity for two people to argue with each other. Now I suppose listening to two people on opposite sides of an issue argue with each other does have some inherent usefulness – I learn a lot about the issue and can decide where I stand – but most of the time it seems more like these two people are arguing simply for the sake of arguing.
I keep seeing this lately. GW Bush or Hillary Clinton will say something stupid, and people will line up for or against them purely based on partisanship, not on actually thinking about the issues at hand. It’s like a game of football for people who graduated with degrees in economics. In my mind I imagine people from Yale and Harvard, graduation caps on their heads, rolled diplomas in hand, kicked back on their La-Z-Boys with a big bowl of popcorn and a beer, watching speeches and hooting and hollering like they’re in a frickin’ frat watching the Superbowl.
This kind of no-think bullshit drives me nuts. I’m not immune to doing it either, but recognizing it helps significantly. Any time Bush opens his mouth lately, I’m ready for something purely idiotic to come out, and I’m right there to make fun, or laugh, or lament, or gnash my teeth. But he does occasionally actually say things that make sense, and although I’m always surprised by them, I’ll be the first in line to commend him for it. Fortunately I have friends on both sides of “the aisle” who can call me on my shit and make me think about the issues.
But I worry that we’ve devolved into such a partisan culture. Or maybe it’s that I live in San Francisco. In any case, I find myself wishing that all of the people (like me) who spend so much time tearing apart the politicians would spend half of that contributing to their own community and solving the issues they find there. But that would make too much sense.

Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for literature this year, and his acceptance speech was quite a doozy. Made big news in the UK apparently, but of course here in the US it barely produced a whimper. I think I heard a bit of it on Democracy Now, that was about it.
Anyway, it’s long, but worth a read. You probably will agree with some of it, and disagree with some of it, but it will make you think and it’s well written. His lecture is called “Art, Truth & Politics”, and deals a lot with things the United States has done that perhaps we shouldn’t get away with. Check it out!

Don’t know if you’ve already heard, but San Francisco voted to ban handguns in the city (aside from law enforcement etc), and also oppose military recruitment in public schools. Bill O’Reilly had an entertaining response… what a goofball:
“Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead,” O’Reilly went on. “And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”