Mark Goldblatt on poor political argument:

[N]ot every fact carries equal evidentiary weight. Quality and quantity matter. Cherry-picking a handful of factual outliers, in other words, is not enough to overturn the common sense view of the reality you're describing. Nor is it incumbent on those who subscribe to the common sense view to defend their position from scratch. When you're arguing against common sense, the burden of proof is astronomically higher on you than on your opponents. [. . .]

Truthers on the Left (and, to be fair, Obama Birthers on the Right) are caricatures of rational thinkers, analytical burlesques whose access to a computer modem transforms them from tightly-wound troubled loners to tightly-knit troubled communities. But their inability to grapple with the burden of proof is reflected in the broader political culture. How many left-of-center talking heads and columnists, for example, regard as axiomatic the proposition that President Bush lied the United States into war with Iraq? If you stop and think about it, though, you realize the claim is extraordinary because it presupposes moral monstrosity. It presupposes, in effect, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, as well as their entire staffs, would intentionally authorize mass murder on a scale of thousands in order to . . . do what? Make their already rich friends slightly richer? [. . .]

There is a growing consensus that political rhetoric in the United States has become too overheated, that passions are bubbling over, and that reasonableness is on the wane. If more people understood the function of the burden of proof in rational discourse, we could begin to address that problem. Healthy debate is not measured by decibels. Not all voices deserve to be heard.