There should be a 'Moment of Truth: Election 08 edition'

This is an interesting topic. Just so you know, I don't watch "Moment of Truth" but I have read a few articles about it and am familiar enough with the concept to participate in this debate. 1. after all the years of electing our president,from Washington to Bush 2, someone has always been unhappy about that person in office. Agreed. 2. There' no one to blame except the voters who put the crummy president into office. Well, you could also blame the politicians for running, but I mainly agree with your point. However, you seem to be implying that because someone has always been unhappy with the president, that president is a crummy president. That's not necessarily true. People disagree on so many issues that even if they knew the entire truth about a candidate, not everybody would agree on whether certain things were good or bad. 3. Well, now we have a method to see what we're really getting into: lie detectors. That is the main reason I decided to debate you on this topic. Lie detector tests are unreliable. "As early as 1965, a congressional committee concluded that there was no evidence to support the polygraph's validity; a 1997 survey in the Journal of Applied Psychology put the test's accuracy rate at only 61 percent. Polygraph evidence is generally inadmissible in court because, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his majority opinion in the 1998 case U.S. v. Scheffer, "there is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable." Indeed, the lie detector is so untrustworthy that Congress passed the Employee Polygraph Protection Act in 1988, making it illegal for private-sector employers to compel workers to take polygraph exams." (http://www.motherjones.com...) Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Drew C. Richardson, an expert on polygraphs, testified that, "[Polygraph screening] is completely without any theoretical foundation and has absolutely no validity. Although there is disagreement amongst scientists about the use of polygraph testing in criminal matters, there is almost universal agreement that polygraph screening is completely invalid and should be stopped. As one of my colleagues frequently says, the diagnostic value of this type of testing is no more than that of astrology or tea-leaf reading. If this test had any validity (which it does not), both my own experience, and published scientific research has proven, that anyone can be taught to beat this type of polygraph exam in a few minutes." (http://antipolygraph.org...) And it would be even less accurate for the kinds of questions the presidential candidates would be asked. For example, say one of the questions is, "Are you going to raise taxes?" The candidates might say, no, and be telling the truth, but then raise taxes. They might not PLAN to raise taxes, but plans change. In addition, the president does not necessarily have the power to do things. A candidate could always say, "No, I won't raise taxes," and omit to mention that Congress will be raising taxes. Or the candidates could say, "I plan to…" or eve that they will do something. Even if they mean it at the time, that doesn't mean it will happen. Even if lie detectors were reliable, they would be useless for statements about the future. I think we can agree that most politicians lie. If politicians knew they would have to take a lie detector test, the people who would not be afraid to run would be those who are able to beat a lie detector test. Or the politicians who are running would go through the kind of training CIA agents use to learn how to fake out the polygraph. As Dr. Richardson testified, "anyone can be taught to beat this type of polygraph exam in a few minutes." I don't think that the networks would ask questions about the politicians sex lives and lingerie not so much for the reasons you stated as because the candidates could just make it clear ahead of time hat questions they will answer. I'm not sure about the show, but on normal polygraph tests the subjects are told ahead of time what questions they will be asked. My reason for being against this proposal is not for fear of the candidates being asked about their sex lives, but because giving political candidates polygraphs would not help anything as polygraphs are unreliable and would be even more unreliable for the kinds of questions that would be asked, but would give the voters a false sense of security, and would encourage politicians to learn how to beat the polygraph. The polygraph makes interesting television, but it's not reliable enough to base something as important as an election on.