Therefore, when politicians, journalists, and black leaders attack Southern history and traditions, all employ false reasoning masked as logic. Our Southern forefathers would have recognized these logical fallacies immediately, for their classical education included a solid foundation in logical reasoning. In fact, reasoned thinking was considered so important to citizenship that that the most common transgressions were identified with Latin names. It is time for modern Southerners to recall the signs of false logic and counter with solid arguments. The following is an abbreviated list of the most popular false arguments.
Ad hominem is the most often used logical fallacy because it is so easy.
Whenever a person attacks an opponent rather than proposing arguments against the opponent's position, the ad hominem argument is being used. It is a means of ignoring the facts by using the smokescreen of a personal attack on the opponent. Because this logical fallacy is so popular, a number of varieties have developed. One of the more prevalent varieties is name-calling. In the summer of 1856 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the forerunner to Ted Kennedy, attacked a South Carolina senator for daring to suggest that the Constitution guaranteed that Kansas would be a sovereign state whose citizens could determine their own domestic policies, free even from the political preferences of nosy Massachusetts senators.