Sometimes you only know you’re on the wrong road when it leads someplace the right one wouldn’t go. Logicians call that process reductio ad absurdum — the reduction to absurdity.

For instance, this thing with eating your dog. In the Marines I was stationed for a time in Korea. On liberty some buddies and I went to a restaurant and ordered the chicken … I think it was the barkingest chicken ever. There’s a moral in there somewhere.

But global warming Chicken Littles should think about where their argument is taking them (Mild NSFW).

Of course, the wise and learned scholar at the link wasn’t talking about eating your dog. That would have been absurd:

“The title of the book is a little bit of a shock tactic, I think, but though we are not advocating eating anyone’s pet cat or dog there is certainly some truth in the fact that if we have edible pets like chickens for their eggs and meat, and rabbits and pigs, we will be compensating for the impact of other things on our environment.”

See, his idea is pet chickens.

	Raising pets for food is a contradiction, because a pet is an animal you like alive too much to eat. Not only that, but he’s not talking about changing the total number of pets.
Thanks, specialist!

But changing from cats to chickens because cats are useless is only one example of following an incorrect line of thinking to a very silly bad ending. The next one is deadly serious.

Barack Obama supports the right to abortion. He supports it so strongly that as an Illinois State Senator, he thought babies born after a failed attempt at abortion should be left to die.

On March 30, 2001, Obama was the only Illinois senator who rose to speak against a bill that would have protected babies who survived late term labor-induced abortion. Obama rose to object that if the bill passed, and a nine-month-old fetus survived a late-term labor-induced abortion was deemed to be a person who had a right to live, then the law would “forbid abortions to take place.” Obama further explained the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not allow somebody to kill a child, so if the law deemed a child who survived a late-term labor-induced abortion had a right to live, “then this would be an anti-abortion statute.”

Letting babies die is something at which civilized people tend to recoil. If the road takes you to the wrong place, take a different road.

Democrats would never dream of cutting Medicare without the context of the current push for socialized medicine. Would they?

And the policy of supporting candidates who “can win” leads to supporting Obamunists instead of Doug Hoffman.

So beware. Is there anything in your agenda that is clearly stupid, but for the sake of ideological consistency, or inability to admit when you are wrong, that you continue to support?

Also at The Minority Report.