Commentator: Unfortunately, Roehmer' s opinion column has a polarizing effect on national politics. She has always taken a partisan stance, and lately she has taken the further step of impugning the motives of her adversaries. That style of argumentation is guaranteed not to change the minds of people with opposing viewpoints; it only alienates them. But that is likely not a problem for Roehmer, since her column is just an attempt to please her loyal readers. The reasoning in the commentator's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument ['concludes that one event caused another merely because that event occurred immediately prior to the other', 'criticizes a column merely by invoking the personal characteristics of its author', 'employs a tactic at one point that it elsewhere objects to', 'fails to rule out the possibility that a purported cause of a phenomenon is actually an effect of that phenomenon']