Dirty hands

More frequent than George Will’s use of “traduce” is David Brooks’ dichotomizing:

>And so there are two kinds of politicians: those who become creatures of the process, and those who, like Pryce, resist and retain the capacity to be appalled by what they must do.

Only two? But notice, they both do the same thing. Perhaps the more appropriate conclusion would be there is only one type of politician. But that wouldn’t be a specious dichotomy anymore, it’d be a specious generalization.

3 thoughts on “Dirty hands”

  1. It seems that there are two kinds of David Brooks columns: those that employ cheap rhetorical devices to cover up the obvious inaccuracies and gross oversimplifications in analysis, on the one hand, and those in which unsound argumentation is used to minimize of the true complexity of domestic and geo-politics and obscure the lack of factual basis, on the other.

    Hey, that’s either rather fun or truly pleasurable.

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