The Word of Obama and The Word of Bush

by Catherine Klene, Alestle Online Editor

President Barack Obama gave his State of the Union speech Tuesday, and moments after it was over, every news network from CNN to Fox News to the BBC had in-depth analysis… sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. (I don’t care how many magic boards or Twitter followers CNN has, I really don’t think they are relevant to explaining the speech.)

I’m not a political expert, and I won’t pretend to be one.  However, I am a writer, and it’s interesting to note which words are chosen and which audience is trying to be convinced.

Call what follows an amateur political experiment.  I created word clouds of Obama’s 2010 State of the Union speech and President George W. Bush’s 2008 State of the Union speech.  (For those who don’t know, word clouds are a computer generated mashup of the most frequently used words in a block of text.  The bigger the word in the cloud, the more frequently it’s used.)

Again, not an expert, nor am I Wolf Blitzer, but feel free to drawn your own conclusions from the word clouds below.

President Barack Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address

Obama’s Top 10 Words:

1. American   25
2. You              25
3. Who             25
4. From           23
5. Know           22
6. Economy    22
7. We               22
8. Plan             21
9. Every           20
10. People         19

President George W. Bush's State of the Union Address

Bush’s Top 10 Words:

1. America     30
2. Must           29
3. Congress    27
4. You             26
5. Them          26
6. Year            24
7. New            24
8. Us               22
9. More          22
10. Iraq           21

Nobel Peace Prize needs new selection guidelines

by Sean Roberts, Alestle photographer

On Oct. 9, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. This brought much controversy. Some believed that this was well deserved, and some had much less kind words. In my opinion, it is too soon to tell.

In the Catholic Church, in order to be considered a saint, you must have been dead for 100 years. This is supposed to prevent bias from thinking too much in the present. After all, anything looks better now than it might in the past, and it is very easy to fall into hype. I think a similar system should be used for the Nobel Peace Prize, just not as dramatic.

Instead of 100 years after their death, it should be something like 10 years after their accomplishment. This way, we will have had plenty of time to decide whether or not the achievement was really worth it, or if it was just hype. I am not saying that Barack Obama does not deserve the prize – there’s a very good chance he does. However, are we really in a state where we can judge, unbiased, that he deserves the peace prize when he has not even ended his presidency yet?

To be fair to everyone, from other recipients to the world as a whole, something as important as the Nobel peace prize should not be made based entirely on hype. We should work to avoid letting hype get in the way of things. All presidents, Republican or Democrat should have to wait at least 10 years after their accomplishment in order to get the prize, or they should at least be given the time to leave their spot on their presidential chair.