Tag Archives: Logical fallacies

Charles Krauthammer, Equivocation, False Dichotomy, Slippery Slope, Straw Man, Things that are false

She blinded me with ethics

There's a certain laughable cluelessness about George Will.  One can seriously wonder whether he really knows that most of his columns advance the shakiest and silliest of arguments.  The same is not true of Charles Krauthammer, his arguments advance a fairly malicious brand of sophistry–in particular, the sophistry of wrongly or dishonestly (i.e., by distortion) claiming others guilty of sophistry.  See for instance his column on Friday (cf., the greatest non sequitur ever foisted)

Today the topic is stem cells.  Two things.  Krauthammer is not incapable of making a reasonable argument, and the stem cell issue deserves to be approached with some amount of seriousness.  Having said that, it seems that Krauthammer in his most recent column does not approach the issue very seriously.  Here's the first bit of unseriousness:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

The first part of the second paragraph is false in the sense that Obama does not leave the matter entirely to scientists.  But the second part is a bit of ridiculous hyberbole of the slippery slope variety: if we leave the matter entirely to scientits (who are amoral!), we will get Joseph Mengele (that's a very swift violation of Godwin's law by the way).  Here, for reference, is the relevant section of Obama's speech:

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society. 

Moving on to the more malicious bits.  Here's Krauthammer again:

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" — would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

It's not a stretch to suggest that the Bush administration had a particular disdain for science and scientists who disagreed with their policy agenda.  See The Republican War on Science, 238ff, for why someone might plausibly assert such a thing about the Bush administration (so spare us the feigned shock please).  But more specifically, the "implication" (that's a logic term) is not that Obama is guided soley (you'll see what he does with this in a moment) by science.  That is an overly strong and decidedly uncharitable version of the claim Obama is making.  Continuing:  

What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand — this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

No straw man has been identified, however: Obama has argued that the choice between the two is false, so naturally he does not choose between the two! (See the quote above).  Besides, Obama obviously does not share (see quote above) Krauthammer's nihilistic conception of science, nor does he intend to allow such a science to exist or flourish on the federal dime.  Obama has made it pretty clear that he thinks Bush's restrictions, however surprisingly or drammatically delivered, to be out of sync with where we are scientifically and ethically.  Such an argument, outlined earlier in the speech, does not entail now that anything goes or that there is no moral basis for his view–that would be a falsely dichotomous understanding of ethics and a complete distortion of what Obama said.  The weirdest thing about all of this is that Krauthammer seems to agree with Obama's position.

In any case, it is obvious that the issue of stem cell research is a morally intricate one–one that deserves more serious discussion than Krauthammer would allow.

Accident, Hasty Generalization, Slippery Slope, Stanley Fish

Compound error

I read these things and shake my head:

Last week’s column about Denis Rancourt, a University of Ottawa professor who is facing dismissal for awarding A-plus grades to his students on the first day of class and for turning the physics course he had been assigned into a course on political activism, drew mostly negative comments.

The criticism most often voiced was that by holding Rancourt up as an example of the excesses indulged in by those who invoke academic freedom, I had committed the fallacy of generalizing from a single outlier case to the behavior of an entire class “Is the Rancourt case one of a thousand such findings this year, or it the most outlandish in 10 years?” (Jack, No. 88).

That's Stanley Fish, the New York Times' interpreter of the academic world.  Sounds like he has been accused of a hasty generalization in the form of "nutpicking."  I'm not particularly interested in the merits of the charge–Fish seems even to concede it.  One minor observation.  I'm sure we are all guilty at one point or another for reasoning that badly.  The difference is that Fish gets to air out his errors in the New York Times.  Anyway, he makes things worse as he defends himself.  He writes (following directly):

It may be outlandish because it is so theatrical, but one could argue, as one reader seemed to, that Rancourt carries out to its logical extreme a form of behavior many display in less dramatic ways. “How about a look at the class of professors who … duck their responsibilities ranging from the simple courtesies (arrival on time, prepared for meetings … ) to the essentials (“lack of rigor in teaching and standards … )” (h.c.. ecco, No. 142). What links Rancourt and these milder versions of academic acting-out is a conviction that academic freedom confers on professors the right to order (or disorder) the workplace in any way they see fit, irrespective of the requirements of the university that employs them.

Eegads!  "Carrying the behavior to its logical extreme" is the characteristic marker of the slippery slope.  And its supported by an alleged fallacy of accident: certain very jerky professors are going to interpret academic freedom very broadly, and, since they will allege this, there must be a logical connection between academic freedom and being a complete nitwit.  Well there isn't.  Just because the connection is alleged by some–how many, not many I would guess–does not mean the connection obtains.  What Fish has done, in other words, is compound the error of one fallacy (the hasty generalization nutpicking variety) with three more:the slippery slope, the fallacy of accident, and the implied hasty generalization again!

George Will, Straw Man

Generalissimus

2 Comments

In honor of Lincoln's birthday, a discussion of logic.  The other day on the Political Animal blog of the Washington Monthly, one of my favorite liberal blogs (it's a good blog, and it features a real philosopher), I encountered the following:

THE GOP MAINSTREAM…. Given the attention of late on the Republican all-tax-cut plans on the Hill, I thought it was pretty obvious what constitutes the GOP "agenda" when it comes to economic stimulus. And yet, John Cole flags this interesting complaint from Real Clear Politics' Jay Cost.

Who's arguing that "tax cuts alone" will solve this problem? Even if some are, is this the median position on the Republican side? Is this the position of the more moderate members of the GOP Senate caucus like Lugar, Voinovich, and Murkowski? How about moderate House Republicans like Kirk, LoBiondo, and Castle? We might count it as bipartisanship if Obama had picked up a few of them, but he didn't.

Cost was referring to a comment President Obama made during his press conference the other night, when he said, "[T]ax cuts alone can't solve all of our economic problems." To Cost, this was a straw-man argument, since it doesn't reflect "the median position on the Republican side."

I guess it depends on the meaning of "median."

In the House, 95% of the Republican caucus — 168 out of 178 — supported an all-tax-cut alternative to a stimulus plan that included spending and tax cuts. In the Senate, 90% of the Republican caucus — 36 out of 40 (with one abstention) — did the exact same thing. We can quibble about where the "median" is, exactly, but with these ratios, there are only so many ways to stretch the definition of the word.

Indeed, Cost's post identified six GOP lawmakers who, he thought, would be likely to reject such an all-tax-cut proposal. Of the six "more moderate members," half voted with their party in support of a plan that wouldn't spend a dime, and would rely exclusively on tax cuts.

What I find especially interesting, though, is that Cost not only wasn't aware of this, but he assumed that even if some Republicans supported this approach, it must be unfair to suggest that such an idea was part of the Republican Party mainstream.

In other words, Republican lawmakers have gone so far around the bend, they're surprising their own supporters.

This raises an interesting question about how one can honestly and fairly represent one's "opponent."  One annoying thing about some op-ed writers and many bloggers is a tendency to use a very general term to refer to their opponent.  "Conservatives," they'll say, "believe x, y, and z."  X, y and z will often turn out to be silly, but perhaps true, of someone who fits in that group.  I find such employment of general terms (they're not generalizations–those involve inferences from the particular to the general) very often inaccurate and for that reason dishonest.  This is especially true of blogging, when one can provide all sorts of evidence about the beliefs of one's opponents.  I think it is also especially true of op-eds, where the bar should be set much higher in that newspapers have editors.  For this reason, I bristle when I read this kind of thing (from none other than George Will):

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor — on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else — will completely pay for itself. For liberals, "stimulus spending" is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative. 

And some paragraphs later:

Today, again, we are told that "politics" has no place in the debate about the tripartite stimulus legislation, which is partly a stimulus, partly liberalism's agenda of social engineering and partly the beginning of "remaking" the economy. 

Surely a man with an Ivy League education can find it in him to name one representative person who asserts this.

It turns out that such characterizations are straw men–or rather, to be precise, hollow men.  They are hollow because they are so very general.  In the second of the passages above, some liberals might be guilty of wanting to engage in social engineering, but so does everyone, including the author of Statecraft as Soulcraft. 

There has to be a name for this kind of move.  Its generality suggests straw man, so does it's role in criticism, but I think it might deserve its own special name.  Any suggestion?

Ignoratio Elenchi, Ruth Marcus

Saddamy

The op-ed page at the New York Times is pretty bad, what with Dowd, Kristol and Friedman, but the op-ed page at the Washington Post is worse.  To end the year on a negative note, here's Ruth Marcus on why an Obama administration should not pursue criminal charges against Bush administration officials who broke the law.  The whole thing amounts to a classic ignoratio elenchi–none of Marcus's arguments prove or really even support the conclusion that criminal prosecution against Bush administration officials should not be pursued.  My comements in brackets.

First, criminal prosecution isn't the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater. [deterrence isn't the only point of criminal prosecution].

Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. "The Terror Presidency," former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith's account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.

"In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls," Goldsmith writes. [Goldsmith's characterization only underscores the dubious legality of the actions of administration officials]

Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration. [This is the same as one.  It's also just irrelevant.]

Fourth, there is a cost to pursuing criminal charges. As appalling as waterboarding is, for example, it was pursued with the analysis and approval of lawyers who concluded, however wrongly, that it did not rise to the level of torture. If government officials cannot safely rely on legal advice, they will err on the side of excessive timidity. [All criminal defendants can find lawyers who can argue however erroneously that they're client did nothing illegal–this does not make it legal]

Fifth, focusing governmental energy on uncovering and punishing the actions of the past will inevitably drain energy and political capital from the new administration. It would be a better use of the administration's time to figure out how to close Guantanamo and deal with the remaining prisoners. [these are not mutually exclusive]

In a State of the Union address in 2003, Bush uttered the following words about Saddam:

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages — leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained — by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.) 

Saddam's leaving thousands of Iraqis dead and obtaining false confessions through torture were lawlessness on a scale worthy of military invasion at the cost of thousands of lives of killed and wounded soldiers and civilians.  One would think that such things might be worthy of criminal investigation, and, perhaps, prosecution.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion

A Simple One

8 Comments

Nothing fancy. 

Teacher writes to the founder of the Helios project "which brings Linux to school kids in Austin."

 "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. … This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…"

"Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."

I'll leave the question of eloquence aside, but the screaming ad hominem circumstantial is something a Logic teacher with an exam to write must love.

General discussion, George Will, Straw Man

The hollow man

11 Comments

In general, one commits the straw man fallacy in a situation of criticism–when one challenges someone else's argument in anything other than its true and charitable form, one is in danger of committing the straw man fallacy.  Let me give an Al Gore example.

  • Al Gore argues that curbing carbon emissions is critical to reducing the impact of climate change.  He points to numbers and charts and data and stuff like that.  I see what he's saying, he saying we should get rid of all of our cars!  

The claim after "I see what he's saying" obviously bears little resemblance to what Al Gore is saying.  It's funny, in fact, how often that claim–oh, I see what you're saying!–precedes a straw man.  It's like a straw man warning.  

Anyway, back to what I was saying.   The straw man fallacy admits of a couple of variations.  You might call the most common variation the "misrepresentation" form.  It consists in the distortion of an opponent's actual position.  Take the above example.  Al Gore argues for more sensible carbon policies, but he does not advocate the rapid elimination of the automobile.  Another form, recently discussed by Bob Talisse and Scott Aikin, involves selecting the worst of an opponent's argument for attack.  This one lacks the outright stupidity or dishonesty of the misrepresentation form, although it involves the false claim that the weak argument is the strongest one.  Talisse and Aikin call this "the weak man" argument. One other common form of the straw man, the one I see today in the work of a dear friend of the NonSequitur dot com, involves completely inventing an opponent and an opponent's argument, and then attacking that and claiming victory.  Call this the hollow man argument.

This is just what George Will does today.  He writes:

Reactionary liberalism, the ideology of many Democrats, holds that inconvenient rights, such as secret ballots in unionization elections, should be repealed; that existing failures, such as GM, should be preserved; and, with special perversity, that repealed mistakes, such as the "fairness doctrine," should be repeated. That Orwellian name was designed to disguise the doctrine's use as the government's instrument for preventing fair competition in the broadcasting of political commentary.

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

The only problem is that, as has been pointed out all over the place, no one advocates the fairness doctrine.  Will doesn't even name one person who supports the fairness doctrine in his article.  Yet he concludes:

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism's name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair. 

This is really appalling, even for Will.  Normally he can muster at least a straw man.  But I wonder whether his inability to find someone to slime is a step forward or a step backward.  

bad company, Bloggers, General discussion, Specious allegations of fallacy

Association by guilt

Perhaps some of you might have heard that Barack Obama has been "pallin' around with terrorists," such as William Ayers of the Weather Underground, or that he listened while his minister criticized America, or that some guy from the same city as him is going to go to jail.  Such are the McCain campaign's charges.  You might also notice that these are attempts "guilt by association" (here we call it "bad company"). To many, such a tactic is wrong on its face.  Rather than discuss the substantive policy questions that ought to be driving the current Presidential race, we have to sit through endless stories about who met with whom when where and how.  It certainly is dumb, and it makes all of us dumber.  Here's a well known leftish blogger:

So Palin’s "palling around" accusation is no more true than her boast that she "told congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’" on the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. But it seems to me that pointing out factual errors gives this line of argument too much credit: guilt by association, even when the association happens to be real, is a silly charge.

It's not a silly charge, however.  Whether the charge is true is certainly important.  As important as that, however, is whether the charge is relevant.  Relevance, in fact, is what makes the difference between a fallacious guilt by association charge and a legitimate one.  It's not, in other words, simply a matter of the form of argument.  The content–who is the associate, how long? how important? etc.,–makes all of the difference.

It turns out, I think, that Palin's charges are false or at best misleading.  Ayers is, in fact, a rather prominent person in Chicago politics–he even pals around with such mainstream figures as Richard M. Daley, our longtime mayor.  Besides, Ayers isn't in jail, and he doesn't seem to be currently a terrorist.  Besides that, he, in his civic role in Chicago politics, "palled" around with Republicans as well.

All of this, of course, makes a huge difference as to the relevance of the charge.  If Sarah Palin, for instance, "palled around" with members of a treasonous secessionist political party, I think that would indeed be relevant.  The same would be true for John McCain.  If he palled around with people who advocated assassination as a policy, or who defrauded thousands of people of their life savings, we might have reason to question his judgment.

So, while whether such charges as these are true matters a good deal.  But it matters just as much whether they have any relevance to stuff that matters.  Sometimes they don't.  

General discussion

It’s pronounced Nuke-You-Ler

15 Comments

Let's consider this an open thread for debate discussion.  

I'd agree with these two that the unwatchable thing for me about the post-debate discussion is the pundits' obsession with what they think people will think.  To do that they have to assume much about what people will think–namely whether people will swoon over the "youbetchyas" and the winks and so forth.  And they generally assume they will.  That means they think you're stupid. 

Other than this general observation, I think I've actually had arguments with people like Sarah Palin.  One can't really have a discussion with someone who can't understand your view, how maliciously distorts her misunderstanding of it, refuses to address any challenges, and considers all criticism to be directed at her and her lovely family (and by extension everyone like her). 

General discussion, George Will, Ruth Marcus, Straw Man

Stand down

A few posts back (and for a couple of posts) I remarked on the tendency of "liberal" pundits to separate themselves from the "liberal" candidate by frequently criticizing him or her, usually for failing to look enough like the conservative candidate.  Yesterday Ruth Marcus provided another excellent example of this–going after one of Obama's campaign lines for "misrepresenting" John McCain's record.  I wouldn't quibble with the criticism, my view is that no one should misrepresent anything.  But there is a question of scale. 

We have on the one hand Obama, in Marcus's world guilty of a straw man for not criticizing the strongest versions of McCain's one-time social security plan (Obama said had McCain had his way, many people would now be in dire straits–when in reality, only had this crisis happened a few years on, would people be in dire straits on account of McCain's plan–oops!).  Obama probably is guilty of that logical offense.  It's an offense nearly too typical, in my estimation, for one even to remark upon.  Candidates thrive by knocking down weak versions of each others' policy positions.  Obama didn't need to do it, however, as his point was independent of the specific facts of the case–in a privatized social security market, he had been saying, this is the sort of thing that could really doom us.  And no doubt he's right about that.

But that's not my point.  Marcus, for some reason, wanted to even the truthiness playing field, where McCain and Palin lie repeatedly and without apparent consequence about nearly everything, and Obama misrepresents McCain's position once.  Marcus bent over backwards for apparent even-handedness.  

To my very great and growing surprise, however, Marcus's righward colleagues, usually lockstep in their defense of their guy, have shown me to be astoundingly and thankfully wrong.  Here, for instance, is George Will:

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Ouch. Notice also for a moment the huge difference between Will and Marcus.  Marcus takes Obama to task all of the time (and for the stupidest of reasons–such as he's not "regular" enough); Will, if you look at his recent posts (and search our Will archive) has almost never directly challenged the rightward guy.  He's made, in fact, a rather valient effort in recent days to make McCain's case (arguing, in one instance, that maybe one should not think about the economy, since life has so much else to offer than just money).  

There goes my theory about the right wing pundit corps, my theory of the non-existent left wing pundit corps still stands, for the moment.  

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Narrativism, Straw Man

Now you tell me

2 Comments

In today's New York Times David Brooks argues that Sarah Palin does not have the experience to be Vice President and therefore President.  He joins a growing chorus (he says) of conservative pundits who make this argument.  I can't say of course that I disagree with him or them.  But my interest in punditry here has little to do with agreement or disagreement.  For even in getting to this obvious conclusion, that Palin does not have the requisite experience to be a candidate for such an office, Brooks still encounters logical difficulty.  He cannot escape what has become the single most defining rhetorical trope of his intellectual career–the dichotomy. 

Brooks's dichotomies are not always fallacious ones–it's more often the case in fact that they are not.  A false dichotomy, the reader may remember, suggests two radically opposed and exhaustive possibilities, one completely ridiculous, one your view, as a means of suggesting your view has a kind of deductive support.  On further reflection, of course, one finds there are many shades of opposition to your view, so therefore the dichotomy, and the force it gives your position, is false.  So, for instance, you either endorse constitutional overreach, or you support the enemy and are thus a traitor.  Since one does not want to be a traitor, one finds one must support constitutional overreach.  But then it occurs to one that maybe there are other alternatives to constitutional overreach, so one discovers the dichotomy is false.  That's the fallacious false dichotomy.  Don't get me wrong, Brooks does it a lot.  Today, however, it just the rhetorically false dichotomy.  He writes:

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

People may think this has a kind of sophistication to it–wow Brooks can really distill cultural, economic, and political tendencies can't he!–but it's rather a silly way of looking at complex historical, cultural, etc., phenomena.  He has, in other words, just pulled this out of his ass.  A minimum of inspection will reveal these things are hardly as opposed as he suggests–especially the small town/big city dichotomy.  

Where he gets into logical trouble today is elsewhere, however.  He continues the narrative that Democratic elites' main objection consists in the fact that Palin does not eat arugula:

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

These two paragraphs distill the Palin/McCain campaign's political strategy: call everyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin a cultural elite, characterize the media as the enemy, and so forth.  It's one massive straw man.  But as long as they keep fighting it, the media will keep covering it, remarking on McCain's brilliant strategy in attacking the straw man, and in knocking him down, all the while they will keep asking why Obama can't get them interested in a real fight, and why this makes Obama weak.

But back to Brooks.  Having repeated eight years' worth of straw men, he joins the opposition and claims their arguments, repeated anywhere and everywhere for the last eight plus years, as his own:

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

But before I get to those, I should remark that the above argument would be a false dichotomy.  There's an obvious middle ground between a separate class of executives and caricatured portraits of mountain folk.  But I digress, back to Brooks's agreement with everything he has ridiculed:

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

Yes.  And I think of all of the energetic sophistries Brooks has produced in favor of this ineptness.