Stupid Arguments Watch (A Potentially Recurring Feature)

Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe decided to tilt at false dichotomies about three weeks ago:

Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?

Jacoby argues that the latter – which got us involved in a war that we are not exactly turning into our finest historical moment – is somehow better than the former. May I assert that neither is acceptable (Jacoby admits as much, kind of sort of) and that creating such false dichotomies is, for lack of a better and more accurate phrase, colossally stupid? If you are reduced to making a “my failure is, by my arbitrary and subjective terms, slightly less awful than your failure” sort of argument, I’d say that your case is pretty shoddy.

Credit for pointing my way to this one belongs to Cliff May at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, although I should point out that he would not agree with my conclusion here, so all blame or credit on that front is my own.