Red Card

How many rhetorical fouls can a person commit before being shown a red penalty card and forbidden to play the next game? None sadly. Although, if arguing was a soccer game, Bill O’Reilly would be a fair contender to Gerardo Bedoya’s impressive red card accumulation. 

The argument was going well, two different views, a fallacy here and there, but nothing that would interrupt the dynamic, when suddenly the topic changes drastically. O’Reilly changes the tense away from the future and starts talking about Stewart getting fired. This was utterly unnecessary. O’Reilly commits his second foul  when he humiliates Stewart by debasing him with his supposed firing. He does not allow Stewart to make a choice and rather reduces him to petty defense. 

O’Reilly then says “If you really were sincere you would.” When talking about how Stewart should bring a muslim to replace him. This is not only fallacious thinking (reductio ad absurdum), but also innuendo that Stewart is fake and that people should not trust him. This gives us our third rhetorical foul. But O’Reilly doesn’t stop there. O’Reilly then goes to aggressively shout “If you really cared about the muslim community you’d bring in a substitute muslim host! Let’s call it for what it is!” Which is just utterly stupid. Stewart’s gesture of disappointment and perhaps shame, helps to highlight his contender's stupidity.

This goes to show that when a person is desperate, it succumbs to rhetorical fouls. We see this everywhere in life. In spanish we call it  “patadas de ahogado” in soccer we say “Argentina en el cinco a cero.”