smokescreen, disingenuous, hogwash, ludicrous, specious, furphy, overblown, ploy, ridiculous, poppycock, misnomer, gimmick, strawman, irrelevant, baloney, laughable, absurd, ruse, copout, malarkey, fallacy, semantics, preposterous, bogeyman, charade, specious argument, sophistry, hooey, codswallop, gotcha, overkill, baldfaced, crock, panacea, balderdash, travesty, moot, nonsensical, fallacious, subterfuge, non sequitur, canard, hyperbole, confuses, hypocritical, sour grapes, illogical, oversimplification, obfuscates, boondoggle, simplistic, exaggeration, justification, unhelpful, alarmism, ado, silly, sideshow, baseless, sham, unfounded, unimportant, misguided, scaremonger, fearmonger, hokum, counterproductive, crux, silver bullet, fig leaf, unprovable, misleading, trivial, dismisses, farce, smacks, merely, bothers, pointless, magic bullet, asinine, irks, misconceived, boogeyman, bunkum, spurious, flummery, unworkable, risible, cynically, tu quoque, quid pro quo, purely, tosh, groundless, pshaw, flapdoodle, sensationalist, issue, scarey, tommyrot

deflection, deflexion, deviation, digression, diversion, herring

smoked herring