Friday, September 25, 2009 - 7:49 PM
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:
And, of course.....
Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments.
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.
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 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*
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.
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!
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.
Leon Wieseltier knows Marty Peretz.
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.
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.
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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