{"id":134,"date":"2005-11-01T13:47:47","date_gmt":"2005-11-01T17:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=134"},"modified":"2005-11-01T13:49:23","modified_gmt":"2005-11-01T17:49:23","slug":"the-beam-in-your-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=134","title":{"rendered":"The beam in your eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just like one should be careful not to misspell \u201cmisspelling,\u201d one should be certain not to call someone else\u2019s argument \u201cintellectually disreputable\u201d in an intellectually disreputable way. And so George Will<\/a> cluelessly claims Bush has forced the Democrats into a choice of two equally unpalatable alternatives. But, first, the alternatives are speciously dichotomous. And second, in his zeal for victory in argument, Will didn\u2019t even wait for actual obliging democrats to make any such arguments; his intellectually disreputable democrats are hypothetical, that is to say, fictional, as in not actual. Back to the main point. Along the way to the claim about the not-yet-existent argument being intellectually disreputable, Will points out:<\/p>\n

>Now Reid deplores the Alito nomination because it was, Reid says, done without Democratic “consultation.” But it was during such consultation that, Reid says, he warned the president not to nominate Alito. So Reid’s logic is that nothing counts as consultation unless it results in conformity with Democratic dictates.<\/p>\n

It is not *Reid\u2019s* logic that dictates the childishly narrow interpretation of \u201cconsultation.\u201d It\u2019s *Will\u2019s*. Children do this when they want to stick it to their parents\u2013they play on newfound subtleties of words. Here Will\u2019s puerile Bush takes \u201cconsultation\u201d to include any conversation on the topic of judges, without the obvious component of, say, seriously considering the objections of the consulting party. <\/p>\n

And that\u2019s an insult to Bush as much as it is to the Democrats whose arguments Will cannot even be bothered to wait for. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just like one should be careful not to misspell \u201cmisspelling,\u201d one should be certain not to call someone else\u2019s argument \u201cintellectually disreputable\u201d in an intellectually disreputable way. And so George Will cluelessly claims Bush has forced the Democrats into a choice of two equally unpalatable alternatives. But, first, the alternatives are speciously dichotomous. And second, … Continue reading The beam in your eye<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equivocation","category-false-dichotomy","category-will"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}