Breathtaking Hyperbole

David Burchell reads Peter Hartcher’s purple prose, so you don’t have to:

At times the prose reaches for the clouds and we are treated to extended literary metaphors, such as the credulity-stretching parable of John Howard as Herman Melville’s Ahab, forlornly chasing the White Whale of political immortality…

Indeed, a good deal of what Hartcher presents as grand political drama is simply over-cooked. The description of Howard’s secret offer to resign in the face of disastrous polling as “a breathtakingly grand example of subterfuge” is simply florid, while the accompanying accusations of disingenuousness and “breathtaking chutzpah” become emptily repetitious.

posted on 17 June 2009 by skirchner in Politics

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