The most popular politician these days is “The Straw Man.” Why does it seem like the political parties are “talking past each other” like “ships in the night?” It is because of the Straw Man. The straw man argument is a logical fallacy used in verbal or written exchanges. To use the straw man you simply take your opponents argument, change it slightly so it loses its credibility and then you attack it and knock it down, just like you could if you were attacking a real straw man. Unfortunately, politicians are using this tactic almost exclusively. Watch the presidential debates and most of what takes place will be the genocide of populations of straw men, women, and children. Modern media format doesn’t help at all. Television has been bred for the laziest of attention spans. With only 60 seconds at your disposal, it is easy to feel that your only option is to prop up a straw man and show your constituents that you can beat the hell out of him. Dealing with the real issue on its real merits will always take longer than 60 seconds, and we just don’t have that much time these days.

An example is this: ‘republicans keep talking of death panels, and it’s simply not true, it’s not in the bill, they are using politics of fear!’  Simple, 60 seconds or less.

The reality is that there are numerous commissions and panels of this type and that type that are talked about in the healthcare bill. It is unclear what, exactly, many of these commissions or panels will be doing, and what power they will have. Combine that with the history of what we have seen in other countries like England and Canada, which is, that due to budget shortages they have to ration care because they simply cannot afford to give everyone every procedure they need right away, nor can they pay the doctors to service them all. So a panel decides to ration a procedure; someone waiting for that procedure dies because they can’t wait six or twelve months. That’s just the way the system works. If you have limited supply and high demand, rationing is the only reality. The panel didn’t decide that a given patient should die, but they did decide that a procedure would be limited because they are responsible for keeping the program within budget limits. Governments can’t (shouldn’t) bankrupt their nation. Therefore, they have to limit spending which results in limiting procedures. Limiting availability of procedures means patients have to wait and waiting patients die. Call it what you want but it may actually be in the bill. Unfortunately, that takes longer than 60 seconds to explain to someone.

We see this all the time when two politicians get on television news programs. They spend their precious time in front of a national audience setting fires to the anthropomorphic anthropomorphic
adj : suggesting human characteristics for animals or inanimate things [syn: {anthropomorphous}, {humanlike}] bail of hay they keep erecting, instead of giving the American people the candor they hunger.