Virtually every Tea Party argument is a fallacy. That's not a scientific poll or anything, just a very biased observation through Facebook meme's, which appears to be where the Tea Party gets the bulk of their information, since they don't have the attention span to watch Fox news.
Liberals waste a lot of time trying to argue with these fallacies, rather than just pointing out the fallacy and trying to have a real discussion. This is the first in a series of articles defining some different types of fallacies and how the Tea Party uses them. Hopefully it can save some liberals a little time and/or sanity.
There's no such fish as a red herring. There's herring, but they aren't red. To get them red you have to smoke them. The thing is, when you do that they they also pick up an extremely strong scent.
So, as the legend (which recently has been challenged but it's still fun) goes, they were used to train hunting dogs back in the day. The "red herring" would be used to wipe across the trail of the fox to throw the dog off the scent, distracting him from his original goal.
The expression was picked up both as a literary technique and as a name for a type of fallacy. The fallacy occurs when another argument is introduced to distract from the main argument. The Tea Party Republicans and the NRA have used this in a number of forms to distract form the gun control debate.
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