I can explain it. The President ordered his cabinet to take performance enhancing drugs, but they were accidently switched with stupied enhancing drugs;). It's as good an explanation as any:).

what, exactly, Jackson was thinking over the past week.

Where's the Scotch?

More like "what was he thinking after the press and the blogs picked up his speech?"

It simply won't do to evaluate the Secretaries statement from a reality based framework, anymore than the motion of electrons can be explained by Newtonian mechanics.

Mr Jackson has simply learned the lessons of the Bush administration , create your own reality. What is needed is a political science that can explain the strange universe created by Dubya.

HUD is a bad idea from the Great Society made worse by the Republicans.

So at least it is a bipartisan mess.

And as long as Karl Rove is apart of the Bush administration do not believe anything you hear, unless it is blazingly stupid.

Explanation:

1. The event happened pretty much as described, initially.

2. The HUD Secretary sent a memo saying "do not approve".

3. The memo was ignored by professional staff; BUT

4. They denied it anyway, for a defensable reason.

5. They let the HUD Secretary believe what he wanted to believe, bcause he isn't really running the agency anyway.

6. But, now that an explanation was given, the folks answering the phone had to come up with some plausible story. This was the best they could do.

Dan,

"regular, law-like patterns govern a large part of political phenomenon worthy of study"

can you give an evidence for this claim? Which political theory was able to predict something, anything? (This is an honest question, not mockery. I'm just not familiar with political science.)

Lee,

Dr. Drezner won't like this, but here's a law. Take an ethnically divided society under a dictatorship, release the pressure of the dictatorship, and you get -- ethnic conflict. See Yugoslavia, see Iraq. Obvious? Well not to the supergenii in the Bush administration. But here is a non-obvious corrolary, if you increase the amount of ethnic diversity in a society, the amount of government action (oppression) to prevent conflict will increase. See hate speech laws in the UK, Australia and Canada (and coming to a state near you, most likely).

Mitchell,

Actually, recent work in political science suggests that the inevitability of ethnic conflict in diverse socieities is much-overstated -- there is certainly no "law" that ethnic groups are bound to come into conflict with one another. James Fearon and David Laitin at Stanford have done a lot of work on this concept in general; see especially their piece "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation" in the American Political Science Review, 1996, Vol. 90, No. 4. They demonstrate that ethnic groups are much more likely to cooperate than to fight and provide evidence and an interesting theoretical explanation.

As far as Yugoslavia, V.P. Gagnon of Ithaca College has written a book with a fairly convincing account of what happened without referring to some innate hatred among ethnic groups. The book is The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s.

IIRC, a "gaffe" is when a politican accidently tells the truth.

We have a gaffe here.

Dryen was sentenced to what, 5 years in prison?, for the same antics at the Air Force prior to joining Boeing. I am SURE the same standard will be applied here.

Cranky

You mean you don't remember Reagan walking up to his HUD Secretary (Samuel Pierce IIRC) at a Mayor's Association meeting and saying "Hi, Mr. Mayor"?

Brenton,

First, look at what I said. Is said when you have a dictatorship, then release that pressure, you get ethnic conflict. Second, while I haven't read the Fearon and Laitin for a while, I seem to recall objecting to their definition of ethnic group. Laitin tends to use language diversity, but that's not a good proxy. But I'll have to go look it up again. Thanks for the reminder. Third, it seems to me there is a general tendency in western societies, in response to increasing ethnic diversity, to abridge freedoms. That may be anecdotal, but I think a prima facie case can be made.

Finally, I am in the middle of reviewing Gagnon for nationalismproject.org. There are a couple of problems. First, while his concept of demobilization (i.e. those committed to the Yugoslav ideal became demoralized) is valuable, he cannot explain why the commitment to that ideal was so weak. Nor can he explain the general centrifugal nature of Yugoslavia despite Communist rule. He cannot, for example, explain the 1968 "declaration on the name and situation of the Croatian language" by an appeal to politicians and media 'demobilizing' those who believed in the Yugoslav project. He even more certainly cannot explain patterns of conflict in Bosnia between Orthodox and Muslims dating to the early nineteenth century and before.

Oh, and here's a bit more about ethnicity, conflict, etc

The more academic version is here.

An iron law of nationalism and federation?: A (neo-Diceyian) theory of the necessity of a federal Staatsvolk, and of consociational rescue

Brendan O'leary
Nations and Nationalism
Volume 7 Page 273 - July 2001

Of course, O'leary calls his theory the 'Dicey-O'leary' theory, with tongue in cheek.

The upshot is that ethnic equilibria can develop, but its a process that is often bloody (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Georgia, Armenia etc) or relies on a leading people (e.g. Singapoor)

What was he thinking when he made the speech: 'Nice little establishment you've got here. Sure would be a shame if something was to happen to it.'

What's he thinking now: 'Hey, I didn't threaten anyone. You can look it up.'

Mitchell, thanks for the pointers and explanation.

my favorite part of this whole HUD mess is the use of the word anecdote. Anecdote doesn't mean lie. And it's one thing for the boss to be stupid, but he should be smart enough not to hire stupid.