I know I'm going to get in trouble with the English majors who read me, but I have to air a gripe about political fiction.

This particular rant was prompted by seeing the new WB drama "Jack and Bobby" the other night. First of all, who the hell approved this show? Jack and Bobby "McCloskey" will grow up to be President and Attorney General in 2025 or something like that, but in the meantime they're being raised by their caricature ultra-liberal academic mother. Somewhat unclear as to why they bother to call them "Jack" and "Bobby," no?

Anyway, the show is really annoying. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I don't enjoy political fiction in general is that the arguments tend towards the 'strawman fallacy' (note, this does not apply to political satire, because what's great about satire is that it's totally open with its biases).

Our friends at Wikipedia say it fairly succinctly: "The straw-man rhetorical technique (sometimes called straw person) is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than your opponents actually offer." When you construct a dialogue between two imaginary characters, often there is the temptation (or, in many cases, limitation) to weaken your rhetorical opponents' case even as you offer both sides in an argument. And because the author controls both sides of the debate, this technique might not even technically qualify as a strawman because the arguments themselves are crippled.

This is one of the tricky things about bringing reality into fiction. You have no idea how much it bugs me when somebody says something on "The West Wing" that wasn't properly fact-checked. Not because I rely on the show for information, but because a) perhaps other people do even though they shouldn't, and b) it's a disruption on the smooth surface of the narrative when you happen to know it's not true.

In a strawman fallacy, you construct a different person (hence the name) with different views than your rhetorical opponent so that you can more easily refute their argument than if you directly addressed them. Isn't that the essence of political fiction?