Political Discourse

[woofer]

jbog- I've never seen anything quite like it....really. You were wrong, are wrong, and will continue to be wrong, but you'll try to throw up one straw man argument after the other. I couldn't care less whether or not "Spicer is still in the Navy." It has nothing to do with what we were talking about.

Here's Bush's alpha appointment list, as you'll see Spicer is not one of them. Spicer is still in the navy.

Straw man argument for people who might not know what it is:

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.[1] [2]

Presenting and refuting a weakened form of an opponent's argument can be a part of a valid argument. For example, one can argue that the opposing position implies that at least one of two other statements - both being presumably easier to refute than the original position - must be true. If one refutes both of these weaker propositions, the refutation is valid and does not fit the above definition of a "straw man" argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

More from Wikipedia:

[edit] Reasoning
The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern:

1. Person A has position X.

2. Person B ignores X and instead presents position Y.
Y is a distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:

Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent's position and then refuting it, thus giving the appearance that the opponent's actual position has been refuted.[1]
Quoting an opponent's words out of context — i.e. choosing quotations which are intentionally misrepresentative of the opponent's actual intentions (see contextomy and quote mining).[2]
Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person's arguments - thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.[1]
Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.
3. Person B attacks position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position.