convoluted argument

Creationists come up with convoluted arguments to "explain" the fossil record and the apparent age of the earth.

Many of the other contributors to this volume come up with equally convoluted arguments for discounting or diminishing the Farias book.

"It's a very distorted, convoluted argument that says if poor families leave public schools it will destroy the system," Mr. Fuller said.

In the meantime, the unanswered questions about AZT are leading investigators into convoluted arguments about what other drugs do.

They produce convoluted arguments proving that the key to success is "national dialogue" or "political grounding," but there are always more exceptions than there is theory.

Using a series of elegant and sometimes convoluted arguments, Mr. Yerushalmi makes a persuasive case for another interpretation of Freud's attitudes toward Judaism, his family and his own Jewishness.

But he drew a convoluted argument about Mr. Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda and suggested in closing that he was not telling all he knew because he did not want to reveal top secrets.

Finally, during a pause in a very convoluted argument in which Chade had been sorting dukes and Outislander kaempras into sets and predicting where each group would side, my weariness got the better of me.

One suspects, as Mr. Benfey takes us through his sometimes convoluted argument, that he may be reading back into Degas's 19th-century tableaux some very 20th-century preoccupations, especially the notions of social borders, marginal identities, hidden racial and sexual meanings.

That might sound somewhat patronising, but it is not really, it is merely trying to explain that if someone has been mislead by a convoluted argument which leads to false conclusions sometimes it is necessary to demonstrate how false the argument is by looking at it in detail.

And even the giraffes stop being funny when you realize two things: that the line is part of a convoluted argument about women's unsuitability for certain roles in the military-that is, that these musings have some policy content-and that Gingrich is suddenly making what looks like a real run in the Republican primaries.