Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Share

When someone publishes an op-ed, longer essay, or book, they have to write a tagline.  It's usually two sentences describing their title and affiliation, and whatever big projects are associated with them. 

After watching the preview for The Invention of Lying, however, I began to wonder what these tag lines would look like if they were brutally honest.  With a nod to Megan Mcardle's "Full Disclosure" post from a few years ago, here's fifteen examples I came up with: 

  • Jack Silver is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has been Henry Kissinger's bitch for something like three decades, so when Henry passed on writing something for us, he was the next logical choice.     

 

  • Suzie Wong has never been to the country about which she is writing.  What's in this op-ed is culled from a quick perusal of the Economist and a few phone calls.     

 

  • Cass Bunstein is a law professor.  He dashed off this essay in his head while commuting to work this morning, wrote it in under thirty minutes, and it's still smarter than anything, my dear reader, that will ever pop into your brain. 

 

  • Augustine Cornington has been teaching at an obscure state school for two decades, lying in the tall grass, waiting for her archnemesis to make a mistake in print.  This book review is her chance to completely eviscerate him. 

 

  • Joe Schlub Jr. is a law professor.  This essay is a badly mangled version of an interesting idea he heard Cass Bunstein riff on at a cocktail party last week. 

 

  • Andrew McClutchen is a former governor.  He hopes that this op-ed is the first step in getting beyond that horrible sex scandal from a few years ago. 

 

  • Madeleine McFadden is a former cabinet secretary, and did not write a single word of this policy essay.  It is possible she read the first few paragraphs of it, but that's being really optimistic.

 

  • Jane Babbington has no extraordinary policy expertise.  She does have an awesome book jacket photo, however, and will have better hair and skin than you do until the day she dies.  

 

  • Lou Marston is a very smart professor at Princeton University.  This op-ed is woefully underplaced because he took his own sweet time writing it, and this issue is from last week's news cycle.  

 

  • Robert Knaus lost the capacity to write long-form essays years ago - what you just read is what an intern scraped together from one year's worth of Twitter tweets. 

 

  • Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag.  Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

 

  • Gwen Pollard is an area expert at a prominent DC think tank.  She fervently hopes that everyone has forgotten how completely wrong she was about this topic just five short years ago.

 

  • C. Thomas Pope is a professor at the University of Chicago, and his worldview hardened into an inpenetrable black mass the day he turned twenty-four.  As no amount of contradictory evidence will cause him to change his mind, he is perfectly willing to make absurd, idiotic statements without worrying that he is wrong. 

 

  • Richard Jensen is a professor at Harvard University.  He has the Mother of All Balloon Payments due on his mortgage next year, so any extra income helps. 

And, of course.....

  • Daniel Drezner is a professor at Tufts University, and is publishing the fifth version of exact same idea with this essay.  Seriously, the man would be nothing without the cut and paste function.

Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments. 

 

BRETT

8:52 PM ET

September 25, 2009

Let's see- Stephen Walt is a

Let's see-

Stephen Walt is a professor who apparently wrote a couple of essays and books on Balance of Power (which nobody except Security Studies students read) and a single book on Israeli influence on US Politics (which nobody reads anymore but everybody criticizes). He's bald, and he gets more comments than Drezner.

David Rothkopf was/is some big-wig at some point back in the 1990s. Now he occasionally posts on a blog now and then (where he has the coolest post titles but few comments most of the time), and doesn't use paragraphs in his responses!

Ian Bremer is apparently a political consultant. He wrote several books with cool titles that no one reads. He also has the misfortune of having the Foreign Policy blog located last on the tab and with a name like "The Call".

Daniel Drezner is a hip libertarian. He stayed at a Holiday Inn.

 

BILL HARSHAW

9:05 PM ET

September 25, 2009

Joe Hackpundit

Joe Hackpundit today describes the irrefutable logic and rightness of a position which he once described in these pages as totally wrong. But that was four years ago, the other party was in power, and the past is not worth mentioning.

 

SJC

11:29 PM ET

September 25, 2009

the awful truth

sjc is happy with this book, but is depressed in the knowledge that it will not end the relentless questioning from her mother about getting married/having a baby because she just wants her to be "happy".

*sigh*

 

GRANT

6:17 AM ET

September 26, 2009

Misha Glenny is an author of

Misha Glenny is an author of books whose main point of credibility seems to be that he was a correspondent for The Guardian and later the BBC. Despite this, he amazingly has an ability to actually know something about serious problems that no-one else in the world gives a damn about.

 

JUMBO

6:01 AM ET

September 27, 2009

Forces of Fortune

Vali Nasr’s new book put forward a new and enlightened proposition that deeply enriches the PoliSci literature. He has just figured out that “jihad is not good for business” and he REALLY needed to write an entire book to make that point. (We’d rather he were selling jeans in Turkey).

See now why he was on the “Daily Show”?! Try topping that, Drezner!

 

STEPPER

11:02 PM ET

September 27, 2009

Graeme Spencer Compton-Twistlethorpe...

...is a distinguished professor of modern government at Mary Magdalene College, Oxbridge, and the winner of the Primula Prize for Political Inquiry. Although he isn't any smarter than a typical poli sci professor at an American state university, he knows that Yanks are suckers for Brit authors with upper class names.

 

WITHYWINDLE

1:07 AM ET

September 28, 2009

Over at The New Republic

Leon Wieseltier knows Marty Peretz.

 

VGG

6:50 AM ET

September 28, 2009

The Real Problem

These ad hominem remarks promptly show the somewhat unscientific nature of international politics studies. Not that math scientists don’t hate each other – but at least they focus their debate on hard data.

We need to care more about real science and less about such trivia, methinks.

 

BRETT

8:59 PM ET

September 28, 2009

It shows that we have a

It shows that we have a better sense of humor about our own field.

 

ANON_ANON

2:14 AM ET

September 30, 2009

Lindsay Loberg

Lindsay Loberg specializes in feminist and critical theory approaches to IR. She criticizes Ron Rezner for some of his blog posts. Interestingly, though, she only seems to blog when Ron Rezner writes something that makes her mad.

 

PHIL K

3:01 AM ET

September 30, 2009

Cleve Stemmins

is a high-level beltway glad-hander. He writes a popular blog with two main foci: sucking up to others and sucking up to himself.

 

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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