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Debate 2012 drinking game and fallacy bingo: Get informed, get blitzed, or both!

Planning to watch Denver's first-ever presidential debate tonight? Getting together with friends and family to do it? Well, here are a couple of suggestions that could make the evening livelier no matter who emerges from the talk-fest with the best reviews: a presidential debate drinking game and "Debate Fallacy Bingo."...
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Planning to watch Denver's first-ever presidential debate tonight? Getting together with friends and family to do it? Well, here are a couple of suggestions that could make the evening livelier no matter who emerges from the talk-fest with the best reviews: a presidential debate drinking game and "Debate Fallacy Bingo."

How do you play? Glad you asked.

The website DebateDrinking.com has all the details about how to make the debate go quicker with liquor. First, choose a candidate. Then take a drink -- you decide how much is too much -- every time your guy says a key word.

Here's the suggested list for President Barack Obama:

Millionaires

Voucher

Let me be clear

Bain

Inherited

Invest

General Motors

Middle Class

Families

Clinton

And here are the approved terms for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney:

16 trillion

Unemployment

ObamaCare

My friend

Job Creators

716 billion

Redistribute

Private Sector

Work

Reagan

Other details about the game are on the website -- and for those of you who lose count, the DebateDrinking.com Twitter account will be keeping score in real time.

Less interested in getting sloshed, but still want to play along at home? Then Debate Fallacy Bingo may be for you.

Continue for game cards and rules for Debate Fallacy Bingo. Courtesy of Scribd user Peter Bradley, here are game cards and rules for Debate Fallacy Bingo, in which players mark a space every time either candidate uses a dubious debating technique, as defined on the cheat sheet supplied below.

Be warned: Things could get complicated. For instance, the definition for "equivocation" reads, "When an argument relies on an ambiguous word (a word with more than one possible meaning), shifting in meaning, to get its conclusion," while "Genetic fallacy" is described as "saying that some idea's history or origin (genesis) means it is true/false."

And then there's the "Fallacious conditional argument," an example of which is: "If you are drinking beer, you must be over 21. You are over 21, therefore, you must be drinking beer (no one ever said that people over 21 MUST drink beer!)"

Not unless you're playing the debate drinking game. Here are cards and the cheat sheet for Debate Fallacy Bingo.

Debate Fallacy Bingo Cards 2012

Fallacy Cheatsheet for Bingo

More from our Lists & Weirdness archive: "Debate 2012: Fifty reasons debate visitors should wish they live in Denver."

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