Heavy on rhetoric indeed.
The next President will have to do more than tell us what Bush is doing wrong. So far you can only see that in the extended text. The short text is just the Bush-bashing rhetoric. I don’t approve of most of the actions taken by President Bush, but I also don’t approve of a lead-in that shows so little respect for someone who tried harder to do anything than a lot of people would.
You know things are bad when Ricky Martin gets press for disagreeing with the Bush Administration.
Shake your bon-bon indeed.
The big speech is tonight. That snuck up on me. Maybe that tells us how much I care what President Bush says anymore since so much of what he’s said lately has sounded way out of touch with the people he’s leading (though sometimes leading means going where no one seems to be headed).
In the spirit of learning and history, I link again to the State of the Union Visualizer from Brad Borevitz. See the important words, length, and grade leve of every State of the Union. Looks like tonight’s will be up shortly after it’s over.
Saddam is dead, no news there. But President Bush’s comments are telling, both in his own views of what is going on and what he may think democracy really is:
It is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror.
What does killing someone who, admittedly, did horrible things have to do with becoming a democracy? Sure, being able to try criminals fairly (which President Bush mentioned just before this quote) is very, very important. But I fail to see how an execution makes Iraq more of a democracy.
DailyKos has some good thoughts on some of the reaction to President Ford’s posthumous comments on the way President Bush has handeled Iraq.
The State of the Union Visualizer will show you all of the annual speeches given by each president and show words used a significant number of times as well as the speech in its entirety.
The most interesting thing to me is that it also shows the grade level of the speech. And it has, not surprisingly, declined over the last 200+ years. President George Washington set the bar with a speech at grade level 22.4 and just over 1000 words. President George W. Bush’s latest ranks at 9.6 with over 5000 words.
For perspective, the last to break the 10.0 grade was President Ronald Reagan. President Jimmy Carter was the last to have a speech past High School at 15.3 in 1981 with 33,000+ words. What did he have to say, you wonder? Click on a word in the speech to read it.
Finally, the last President to break a bachelor’s level speech (assuming grade 16 is the senior year of college) was President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 with 18.2 and 2699 words.
Interesting stuff, no?
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