Logic Look: Straw Man

I am not a logician or linguist so I had gotten confuses by straw man as apposed to red herring fallacies. So I went back to my logic book from collage. We all need a big dose of the informal fallacies. Hopefully we all can understand what is really being said. Even if it is nothing.

Logic for good or bad should be required in high schools. Time to refresh what I knew. I didn't want to copy from my book so I will use this site for now. It has a better list.

Straw Man:

"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. (Cont.)

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person. "

Do the "we can't do nothing" stimulus arguments sound familiar.