What sort of talk is that?

A freshly minted Conservative senator has just sent out a fundraising letter that, among other things, berates Michael Ignatieff for thinking about things. According to today's Ottawa Citizen, Senator Irving Gerstein wrote that,

"Over the course of his nearly four decades working abroad as a professor, pundit, and politician, Michael Ignatieff chose to focus on abstract constitutional, sociological and foreign policy issues while ignoring everyday issues such as the jobs and savings of Canadians."

Now I'm no fan of Michael Ignatieff and on actually reading some of his punditry back in 2006 I declared indignantly that he was "a windbag who takes three paragraphs even to get something wrong" and describd his manifesto as "a vapour of vapidity, a mist of mediocrity, a cumulonimbus of cliché" which, you may observe, is not unqualified praise. But my objection is that he did not think clearly about fundamental things, not that he allowed the attempt to think about them to distract him from the pressing task of making sure constituents had money.