aah, the false dichotomy

An interesting moment just transpired on "The Daily Show."

Author Ilario Pantano was being interviewed by Jon Stewart about his book, "Warlord."

At one point, Pantano was justifying certain US military activities, saying something to the effect that Saddam would have killed an Iraqi sniper that Pantano was searching for if Hussein were still in power, but that all Pantano was going to do was send him to Abu Ghraib.

The audience tittered uncomfortably at that statement, and Pantano went on to explain (and I paraphrase here) that "Iraq has a per capita incaceration rate of one in five hundred, and the United States has an incarceration rate of one in seventy-five, which means that either the Iraqis are a lot more law-abiding than Americans or else there's a lot of bad guys walking around free in Iraq."




Really?


That's all you can think of?

Because I can think of a third possibility real fast.


Perhaps there are a lot too many people locked up in the United States. You know, those "victimless crime" types and such. Or people who have been taken by the Bush administration in defiance of their Constitutional rights as part of the great world war on terror that we are in.


False Dichotomy.

It's one of the favorite weapons in the arsenal of the intellectually dishonest.