(Full Disclosure: I am listed as a contributing author to eTalkinghead.com and do still post there occassionally.)

There is a particular type of blog post that really bothers me. I call it the Tar and Feathers technique.

It's really very simple to do. Pick any issue of even modest political controversy (which these days could be whether or not the sun rises in the east) and head of to a few well known sites on the fringe of either political side. Read through the relevant posts, and especially the comments. Pick the most outrageous nonsense you can find and site that as representative of what "the other side" is saying.

When conservatives do it, they tend to go to the Democratic Undergound or the Daily Kos. Liberals tend to start at Free Republic. If you were going to do it to the Libertarians, you would start at Hit & Run.

At eTalkingHead, John McDonald delivers a well executed example of the Tar and Feather technique in Judge Taylor Gets "Fringed". He makes a couple of minor errors though. First in the headline he lets slip that the sources that spark his outrage are on the conservative fringe. Later in the piece he repeats the error when he describes some comments as "from the outlying edges of the real fringe." The Tar and Feather is a little more effective if don't label your sources as "fringe."

The comments that McDonald quotes are indeed outrageous, even comically so. Unfortunately he provides neither a source nor a link so that his readers could a - verify that someone other than McDonald actually wrote those things and b - give his readers the opportunity to address the comments at the source.

He did do an excellent job with another aspect of the Tar and Feather Technique. He gave no hint of the existence of reasonable, thoughtful criticism of the NSA surveillance decision. No hint of the work done at Powerline. No acknowledgment of this New York Times piece by Ann Althouse. There is of course no mention of any of the analysis done over at The Volokh Conspiracy. While you can get away with outing some of your sources as fringe - particularly if you don't bother to identify most of them - making note that some people on the other side are not insane really defeats the whole purpose of the post.

The Tar and Feather technique is powerfully seductive. Find a few over the top, outrageously stupid comments and hold forth on them with righteous indignation. McDonald is certainly not the only practitioner of the Tar and Feather technique, nor is it a tactic unique to one side of the political spectrum. It is an intellectually dishonest shortcut for reason and argument. And it sucks.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment