Stacking the Deck

This quote, from Aristotle and an Aardvark go to Washington, deserves logical inspection. "If the Iragi regime is able to produce, buy, steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."--George W. Bush, October 7, 2002. The authors, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein analyze this statement by concluding that President Bush was "Stacking the Deck."

Stacking the deck is an argument that omits arguments that could refute the very point being made. In law this is equivalent to the prosecution's failure to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense. When stacking the deck, writers, presidents, and attorneys only give the evidence that supports their premise while withholding evidence to the contrary. This is like Oscar Mayer saying that their hot dogs have 10% less fat than Hormel's when Oscar Mayer's contains 50% fat. It's like our new tardy policy at Muscatine High School.

We were told that tardies to class are now nonexistent since the new policy has been instituted. The new policy punishes a student 30 minutes if the student is late. Students find it economically beneficial to skip the class instead of being late since there's no punishment for skipping. Our administration is stacking the deck when they only report tardy data and failing to report the data of students skipping. Students of science call this "data beautification."

Suppose Hillary says "We cannot take another four years of George W. Bush in the white house given how he has destabilized the Middle East." What Hillary is failing to omit is many of the other bills, laws, and economic policies that were good that also were administrated during his presidency. Hillary was stacking the deck. Is this why a house of cards quickly falls down?