I wish I had a penny for every time I heard this phrase in political discussions.  Many times its directed at me, but not for the reason you may think.  It's not because I think Republicans have definite flaws in their logic, or that I think Democrats have definite flaws in their's; it's really because I think that logic flaws are the only true bipartisan politicians.

My new favorite is this fact: more people voted for Bush than any other President.  Yes, this is true.  And, equally important, this is meaningless.  People attempt to use this fact as if to say "George W. Bush was elected by more people than any president in history!"  Let us examine: the current numbers are as follows (according to CNN.com): Bush received 59,459,765 votes (51%), Kerry received 55,949,407 votes (49%), and Nader received 400,706 votes (1%).  The next closest would be Ronald Reagan in 1984 with 54,455,075, followed by George Bush in 2000, with 50,456,002 votes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781450.html).  But what does this mean?  Absolutely nothing.  The total vote in 1984 was 92,032,260 votes.  This means that Reagan had about 59% of the popular vote.  This means that he was elected by a larger margin.  This also means that, for George W. to have a higher popular vote and a lower margin of win, that the overall vote must have been much larger.  And, you guessed it: the overall number of votes is now tallied at 115,809,878.  That's an increase of 25% over the numbers in 1984.  For George W. to be the most popular president in history (by popular vote), he would have had to receive approximately 62% of the vote (Warren Harding in 1920), or 71,349,093 votes.  He was well short of this by more than 10 million votes.  All things considered, this statistic is as meaningless as the original.  So what if he wasn't the most popular?  So what if he was the most popular?  The win-all, plurality system the US uses makes no distinction between how well one opponent bests all others.  In fact, it makes no real distinction between who gets the most votes.  We all remember the results of 2000, in which George W. actually received 48% of the popular vote.  The real meaningful statistic there is that less than half of all Americans wanted George W. as President in 2000.  Which means, therefore, that the majority of Americans were, according to their votes, unrepresented by the President of the United States.  Ah, but the plurality system is another rant for another day.

This has only recently eclipsed the other statistic often used in debates about stem cell research.  I have heard, multiple times, "Even if you are for stem cell research, you should vote for Bush, because he is the first President in history to federally fund stem cell research!"  Human embryonic stem cell research began in 1998, when James Thomson (The University of Wisconsin-Madison) developed the first human embryonic stem cell line(http://www.laskerfoundation.org/news/stemcell/history.html).  So this is to say that no President before Clinton had the ability.  OK, so that makes the majority of that statistic worthless.  But what about Clinton?  Supposing this statistic is really attempting to say that "George W. supported stem cell research and Bill didn't!"  It is correct to say that Bill Clinton never did anything for direct federal funding of stem cell research.  But what he did do was back the National Institute of Health funding of stem cell research (http://www.aaas.org/spp/cstc/stc/stc01/01-09/stem2.htm).  For those of you who don't know, the National Institute of Health is an agency under the US Department of Health and Human Services, which received over $27 trillion dollars of federal funding in 2003 (http://www.nih.gov/about/).  This means that Bill Clinton backed a federally funded government agency's funding of stem cell research.  The fact that it isn't directly funded is rather meaningless in this respect, except to say that rather than congress deciding how much money to appropriate to stem cell research, the NIH gets to appropriate the money.

So there's today's rant.  Write me nasty things, call me names, attack my arguments.  In the end, it will make us all stronger people.  All I ask, whatever you believe, is that you research your facts and use logic to decide what really is a meaningful statistic.