Tar With The Same Brush Meaning

(transitive, idiomatic) To characterize using the same undesirable attribute, especially unjustly.

Example: 1865, Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ch. 6:
  They are both tarred with a dirty brush, and I can't have the Fellowships tarred with the same brush.
1900, E. Phillips Oppenheim, A Millionaire of Yesterday, ch. 41:
  Were you tarred with the same brush as those canting snobs who doomed a poor old man to a living death?
1920, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, ch. 14:
  Susan still persisted in thinking that poets and tramps were tarred with the same brush.
1922, James Joyce, Ulysses Chapter 13
  Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush Wiping pens in their stockings.
2008, Terry Sweetman, "Kevin Rudd's public service demands nothing new," Courier-Mail (Australia), 6 June (retrieved 21 May 2009):
  And few would distinguish between state and federal public servants, tarring them with the same brush of disdain.

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