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_95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it__ supposed to be about. Meaning it__ become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody__ pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil [_] Political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one__ own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything__ relentlessly black-and-whitened_. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying_ How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country__ macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy__ outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way__s is the belief that every last person you__e in conflict with is an asshole__ut it__ childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.