IchMael - You mentioned this.... "For example the uses the false dilemma or the false dichotomy as the reason to support the health care bill as if the only way to reform health care is to support the bill. If you do not support the bill you are against health care reform."

Ah, yes! The old false dichotomy rhetorical device...

I wouldn't doubt that Obama has pulled that routine more than a few times, because virtually ALL politicians do it in order to get people to support some initiative they're pushing. They present a false set of divergent alternatives as if those were the only 2 choices available.

Here's a great historical example, still advanced today by people:

The A-bombs were supposedly dropped on Japan "to end the war without having to lose millions of lives in an invasion of the Japanese Islands..."

False dicotomy!!! There would have been no necessity whatsoever to invade Japan to end that war. The Japanese were already desperately seeking a negotiated end to the war, and had sent envoys to Stalin so that the Russians could pass their messages on to the USA and Great Britain. (Japan was not at war yet with Russia) Allied intelligence services surely knew that the Japanese were ready to throw in the towel...their navy was gone, their air force almost gone, they were virtually out of fuel and food, their ability to continue functioning was collapsing due to the Allied blockade of Japan.

It could hardly have been more obvious that Japan was within a few months of surrender and was looking for a way to end the conflict.

Yet the bombs were dropped...supposedly to save the millions of lives that would be lost in an invasion that would NEVER need to happen! The public was not told about that.

So a false set of choices was named in order to justify the act, a terrorist act which was not necessary to either end the war or save any significant number of lives.

Why were the bombs dropped? Well, I think the most probable reason why is this: Stalin was planning to declare war on Japan as soon as he had moved substantial forces east from Europe, and he intended to sieze every piece of land he possibly could when he made war on Japan...just as he had siezed everything he possibly could in western Europe. He would have invaded northern Japan, the northermost islands, from the Russian base at Vladivostok, and the Japanese would have had little in that area to stop the Russians. The result of that would undoubtedly have forced the Americans to quickly invade southern Japan, thus experiencing the terrible losses they were expecting there (the south was heavily garrisoned). The end result of the whole fiasco would have been a divided Japan similar to what happend in Korea, and the USA absolutely did not want that to happen!

It was Stalin's expansionist policy the USA feared, not the Japanese unwillingness to surrender...the Japanese wanted to end the war by early 1945, and would have as long as the personal safety of the Emperor was guaranteed. That was the only position they would not have yielded on. (and in the end, MacArthur did guarantee the Emperor's safety, even though the surrender was supposedly unconditional).

So the public was not told the real reason for the A-bombs being dropped...it was done to end the war fast before Stalin could sieze any more territory in Asia.

As it turned out, the Russians did declare war in the last few days and invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This was a profound shock to the Japanese who were hoping for Russian help to negotiate with America and the UK...and it inflenced them at least as much as the A-bombs did to seek an immediate end to the fighting. They were deeply afraid of what the Soviet Army could do to them...having had some nasty experiences fighting the Russians in the late 30s.

If, as I suspect, the USA used the A-bombs to forestall Stalin's war in Asia and end the whole thing fast...well, I can understand why Truman would have done that. But....the public was not told the true reason for doing it. They were told a fairy tale, namely:

"We had to do it to avoid the terrible cost of an invasion of Japan."

They were told nothing about forestalling Russian expansionist wars in Asia.

A classic case of the false dichotomy. And it is still believed today. Russia was the realy enemy by mid-1945. Japan and Germany were finished, kaput, helpless and incapable of threatening American interests any longer, but Stalin was just getting started on doing so in a very serious way, and that was why Truman dropped those A-bombs.

In my opinion.

*****