Word: argumentative
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Public understanding of autism research suffers from two perennial complications: correlational studies and press releases. The report cited in your story is the latest example of both these foibles. The correlational style of argument is as apt to establish that, say, ice-cream sales cause homicides, since both peak at the same time of year. The long list of supposed causes of autism touted in the press has given parents false hope or, worse, false guilt, while damaging autism science and the public's trust...
Because an uninformed public—or worse, a misinformed one—leads to a less than ideal voting public and because this public has the responsibility to elect a governing body, there is a strong argument to fix the problem of unreliable media...
...hasn't done much so far. In her early months as Secretary of State, Rice would sidestep questions about Iraq by stating that the presence of 150,000 troops on the ground meant it was mostly the Pentagon's problem. But that argument has become less persuasive as the violence has continued and all military options - short of a massive increase in U.S. troops - have proven ineffective in dealing with the insurgency. By now, even Bush's dog Barney knows that extricating ourselves from Iraq will require cutting some ugly political deals with an assortment of rogues, who might...
...argument that more troops should have been sent doesn't reckon with the difficulties the U.S. military has faced in sustaining even the current deployment. The strain on U.S. military resources would have precluded sustaining the deployment of "several hundred thousand" troops in Iraq for more than a few months. And it's hopelessly na?ve to imagine that this would somehow have created a window for the emergence of a new democratic Wal-Mart nation that would have prevented the emergence of the darker impulses on view today...
...More troops in Iraq would have made a quantitative difference, but not a qualitative one. And there is some merit to the argument that increasing the size of the U.S. footprint could just as easily have widened the hostility to their presence. The Iraqi insurgency has been impressively adaptive, and would very likely have found a way of expressing its nasty politics even with twice as many American boots on the ground. And the sectarian rivalries that are fueling the civil war are as much present in the democratic political institutions as they are on the violent streets...