YMMV / Star Trek: Articles of the Federation

• Designated Hero: President Bacco, especially during her little bout of Gunboat Diplomacy. She outright threatens to carpet bomb the Carreon because they won't provide the Deltans with a water reclamation system. The problem is that the Carreon are under no obligation whatsoever to hand it over, since it's, you know, theirs.
• Strawman Has a Point: Many.
  • Councilor Cort Enaren's refusal to support the Cardassia reconstruction bill is supposed to come across as mean-spirited and poorly thought out, yet he's not that unreasonable. He's not opposed to reconstructing Cardassia, just the disproportional amount of effort that's going to them instead of Betazed or the other areas of the Federation that are still in ruins after the war. It's not unreasonable for a representative to put his own people first.
  • Admiral Ross is treated as evil for removing President Zife and his cohorts from office, but who else was going to do it? The Federation president is shown to have total control over almost every single branch of government except for Starfleet. Not to mention that the secrecy pulled over Zife's resignation and assassination were the only things preventing a war with the Klingons. Also, he was far from the only Starfleet officer to agree to the plan. Several other admirals, as well as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, were party to Zife's resignation.
  • As noted above, the Carreon's are evil for not providing the Deltans with their water reclamation system. Except, it's their system. They might be negotiating in bad faith, but they're not exactly being offered anything of value for the system in the first place.
  • Bacco and several members of the Federation Council chew out the Triexien councilor for secretly imprisoning a chameloid while serving as magistrate of his planet. But the councilor brings of a lot of reasonable points. It was in a time of undeclared war with the Dominion, paranoia was at an all time high of changeling infiltration, and that the chameloid was arrested not just to confirm his identity, but also for his own safety because he was very nearly lynched when a crowd saw him shapeshift. The only really wrong thing the councilor did was in not releasing the chameloid once his identity was ascertained.