It is a dubious argument, ignoring the strength of Halladay's opponent — the Reds led the National League in runs, hits, homers and batting average — and the degree of difficulty as the tension rises during a no-hitter.
The options-trading crowd isn't the only one dubious of the market's strength.
The Thomas opera is a dubious contraption that clings to the repertory on the strength of its mad scene and its intermittently inspired orchestration.
In any case, the strength of Homeland isn't the occasionally dubious tradecraft (going through immigration at Beirut airport Carrie looks so transparently shifty even a six-year-old child would pull her in for questioning).
Derek Bickerton, an American scholar of Creoles (he defines them as "bastard tongues" of "dubious and disputed parentage"), suggests other reasons for Papiamentu's strength, including the weakness of Dutch compared with other colonial languages.
His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he's reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated.
There is nothing wrong with such advocacy, except that in this case it means that the movie veers away from its strengths, ending in a welter of convenient (and dubious) plot twists and puffed-up speeches.
But he also finds resonance in manga characters like the morally dubious, trigger-happy hero of Death Note: "They have all the super strength, but deep down they're still human," he said.
The uninspired phrases have made some media critics dubious — Slate's Mike Steinberger called him "an insufferable blowhard" — but McEnroe's strengths are like those of Theodore Dreiser, who wrote wooden sentences but understood characters, emotion and story line.
Even as the economy appeared to be picking up strength, Greenspan and Bernanke were reluctant to switch off the monetary spigots, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for dubious ones.
