The Conservative Cat

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September 16, 2007

Confused Americans for Truth - College-Level Current Events Debating Blues

One advantage of working with Bruce is that he's very good at finding information on the web. Unfortunately, his children are frequently unable to take advantage of his skills, because the academic world lives with a completely different mind-set.

For example, one of the girls is involved in a debate in which she's supposed to prove that the troops in Iraq should be brought home. In pursuit of this task, her specific assignment is to find evidence that certain politicians are benefiting financially from the war. Bruce suggested she type Halliburton corruption into a search engine. A lot of results came back, but at a price: Bruce gave her a lecture on why the information is worthless.

See, all this stuff is about the past. It has nothing to do with the future. Perhaps former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is correct when he claims the Iraq incursion is a war for oil, but giving the oil to the terrorists is not going to be good for America. If we do pull out of Iraq, there will be consequences. Those consequences are the only thing that matter when you're discussing what we should do in Iraq.

When you are playing a computer game, and you realize you made a bad decision, you have the option of restoring a saved game from before you made the mistake. That is not how the real world works, but it seems to be the operating environment for debates about the war.

So, if you're debating one of Bruce's daughters about the Iraq war in the next few days, your opponents are making a huge logical error, and don't feel guilty about pouncing on it just because the person assigned to apply the mistaken logic is a beautiful young woman. She's already knows all about it. While you're at it, there are some excellent examples of what happens when the United States abandons its allies in a war zone-- Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Afghanistan. You might want to ask your opponents why the outcome of an Iraq pullout would be any different. I'm willing to bet they haven't even thought about it.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Sun 10:14 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Confused Americans for Truth | Tags: Afghanistan Cambodia conservative education evidence Iraq logic philosophy research Viet Nam war and peace

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