With just a few precious days to go until the November elections, politicians across the United States are pulling out all the stops in an effort to get elected. Vicious attack ads are seemingly everywhere. In fact, many analysts are already proclaiming that 2010 is the dirtiest election cycle of all time. When it comes to politics, the truth is that it is a lot easier to communicate one really bad thing about your opponent than it is to communicate a whole bunch of small positive things about yourself. As the old saying goes, drivers are not going to slow down to look at a pretty sunset, but they certainly will slow down to look at a really bad car wreck. In the waning weeks of the 2010 election, candidates across the United States are desperately attempting to manufacture those “car wreck moments”. This has resulted in an absolute flood of vicious political attack ads popping up on television in recent days. If the Founding Fathers could look back on us now, do you think they would be proud of how we are conducting ourselves?
Sadly, the political attack ads only seem to be getting worse with each new election. According to a new analysis from the Campaign Media Analysis Group, more than 50 percent of all political advertisements during 2010 have been negative attack ads. Not only that, but they found that nearly 70 percent of all political ads for U.S. Senate candidates have been negative.
Is this how politics is going to be played from now on? You just think of as many bad things to say about the other person as you possibly can and you spread them all over the airwaves?
Not only are there more attack ads than ever, they are also getting a lot more personal.
According to Michael Franz, a co-director at the Wesleyan project, the percentage of “personal” attack ads has jumped up significantly this year….
“Fourteen percent of attack ads in 2008, through early October, were focused solely on the personal characteristics of the candidate’s opponent. That number has jumped to 20 percent this year.”
Some of these ads have been so disgusting and so misleading that it is hard to believe that they are actually even real. The following is a list of 8 of the most vicious political attacks ads that we have seen in 2010….
#1 In the Kentucky Senate race, Jack Conway ran a truly disgusting ad accusing Rand Paul of belonging to a “secret society” that “mocked Christianity” and called the Bible “a hoax”. As a result of the ad posted below, Rand Paul refused to shake Conway’s hand at a recent debate….
#2 In the race for Illinois governor, Pat Quinn is accusing Bill Brady of wanting to “mass-euthanize sheltered dogs and cats in gas chambers”….
#3 Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson has actually run an ad in which he refers to his House challenger, Daniel Webster, as “Taliban Dan”….
#4 Michelle’s Bachmann’s opponent in Minnesota, Tarryl Clark, resorted to using profanity in one of her attack ads….
#5 Saturday Night Live got into the act by doing a vicious parody of Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m Not A Witch” ad. It is a funny sketch, but the way that the mainstream media keeps referring to her as a witch over and over and over is just plain wrong….
#6 Joe Sestak ran an ad earlier this year that actually showed Arlen Specter suffering the ill-effects of chemotherapy….
#7 In this next shocking political ad, a challenger accuses nine-term Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard of participating in an organ harvesting ring….
#8 In this last ad, U.S. Senator Harry Reid accuses Sharron Angle of being soft on sex predators….
Is this what we have become as a society?
Is this the best that we can do?
No matter who you support, hopefully we can all agree that many of the political ads that we are seeing during this campaign are absolutely shameful.
Why aren’t the candidates talking about the real issues? Why aren’t they talking more about the Federal Reserve, the exploding national debt, the horrific U.S. trade deficit and the death of the U.S. economy? Why aren’t they running lots of ads about Wall Street bailouts and the Big Brother police state that is being constructed all around us?
The American people are hungry for some real change. But instead all we seem to get is a bunch of classless politicians slinging mud at one another.
Does anyone actually believe that this kind of nonsense is what the Founding Fathers intended when they signed the U.S. Constitution?