Parse the farce

Did you find last night’s State of the Union speech unwatchable? Try looking at it another way. Once again, style.org offers a nice way to visualize the spin: the State of the Union Parsing Tool. Enter in a couple of terms and see maps of their occurrence across all of Bush’s SOTUs. Compare a Bush SOTU against ones by Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Clinton.

To get you started, here’s a screenshot of Bush’s SOTUs mentioning Iraq (red) and oil (blue). Click on it to visit the tool, and then try tracking your own terms:

SOTUs visualization

What this tool won’t do is tell you how often assembled lawmakers hauled themselves out of their chairs for standing ovations. But some things are best left unvisualized.

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