Attack Ads.

Attack ads turn any election into a complete, and utter joke. All credibility is lost when candidates resort to attack ads. In fact, one might as well close thier eyes and randomly pick a candidate while voting, because real issues are not being adressed. Instead we are fed insignificant information that sounds bad.

What if we banned them? I mean, a full scale ban. Run an attack ad, and lose all federal funding for your campaign. Any consecutive ads, and the candidate gets fined. This would make it nearly impossible for anyone to win an election if they resorted to attack ads. I apologize for not being very clear right now, but what do you all think?

I like the idea, but the problem is that most of the attack ads don't come from the candidates themselves, but from their campaign donors or groups in support of them. The 527's, which among other things brought us Swift Boat Vets, was funded by people who supported Bush but weren't actually a part of the main campaign. Though they were eventually discredited, and rightfully so if you really look deep into what was being said and who was running the ads, they caused a great deal of damage in the campaign.

What needs reforming is the loopholes that allow 527's to be funded and run on TV.

Take care all.

I like the idea of banning attack ads and forcing candidates to talk about the issues. Dave Barry also had an interesting idea. He says we should inject all candidates with Sodium Penthothal, also known as the "Truth Serum", thus forcing them to say whatever's on their mind. I'd pay so very much to see that :D

527s are bulltrout anyways. If you run an attack ad you should be subject to huge fines by the FCC for slander and bias during election time. Sinclair broadcasting came close to having that happen to them but they decided not to have their special run.

It is late so I can't really think of what I want to say on this one clearly.

I don't understand people. If you ask anyone what they think of attack ads, they'll tell you that they're bad and they hate them forever. But if you DON'T run attack ads, then you don't win. They're effective and people listen to them...but they hate them. Weird, isn't it?

First of all, to be sued for libel and slander, the attack ad has to be balse. As for being biased during election time, people have the right to be biased if they want to be--no one has the right to force someone to support this or that candidate, nor to tell me that I can spend as much as I want on this, that or the other project--but only so much on campaign ads.

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Though they were eventually discredited, and rightfully so

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The problem being that the Swift Boat Veterans were correct in their allegations.

As for attack ads themselves, I'm not opposed to them. When we vote for a president, we are hiring someone to serve us in one of the most important offices in the country. If I'm hiring someone for an important job, and you know a good reason not to hire this guy, I wanna know.

Moreover, the idea that politics are 'meaner' is not the case either. Attacks have always been part of a campaign, and one of the more common maneuvers has been to claim that your opponent suffers syphilis-induced dementia.

To be honest, I think the reason that we see far more attack ads than issue ads is that there are really only 2 candidates for any office. So rather than having to be a good candidate, you just have to be slightly better than the other guy. So if you can make the other guy look like Hitler/Stalin then the fact that you are a slimeball doesn't matter. You still win because no one wants to vote for a guy that's like a Hitler. If there were three parties or more, you'd see more debates and issue ads because rather than being simply not completely evil, you would have to have an actual plan. You couldn't just say that Joe the Republican wants to cut SS, because there's you & Bob the Green Party guy who wants to make SS a bigger program, and possibly George the Libertarian who wants to get rid of the program altogether. Now you have to have some sort of plan, because there will be 3 other plans out there, and if you don't have the best one, you lose.

So the way to solve the problem is to get more major parties to run for public office so that being slightly less evil doesn't automagicly mean victory.

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As for attack ads themselves, I'm not opposed to them. When we vote for a president, we are hiring someone to serve us in one of the most important offices in the country. If I'm hiring someone for an important job, and you know a good reason not to hire this guy, I wanna know.

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But that's the thing. Attack ads don't provide us with a reason not to vote for someone. The truth (If there is any truth to them at all) is so skewed that it pretty much adds up to a lie anyway.

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He says we should inject all candidates with Sodium Penthothal, also known as the "Truth Serum", thus forcing them to say whatever's on their mind. I'd pay so very much to see that

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You and me both, pal.

we should just ban all advertising.

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Originally Posted by eestlinc

we should just ban all advertising.

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I change the channel. Usually works.

"The problem being that the Swift Boat Veterans were correct in their allegations."

Is that so? I hope you have some links to support that because saying that John Kerry was a "war criminal akin to Adolf Hitler or Osama Bin Laden", as many of those responsible for the ads claimed, is quite a statement to defend.

Here's some info about the director of the Swift Boat Vets John O'Neill, taken from the AP (The last two paragraphs are specifically damning):


"The May 4 Wall Street Journal editorial page featured an op-ed by John O'Neill about Senator John Kerry under the headline "Unfit to Serve." O'Neill is identified by the paper as having "served in Coastal Division 11 in 1969-1970, winning two Bronze Stars and additional decorations for his service in Vietnam." As Joe Conason wrote in Salon.com on May 4, O'Neill has long-standing ties to the GOP establishment, and O'Neill's own p.r. adviser has described O'Neill as sounding like "a crazed extremist."

O'Neill is one of several Vietnam veterans who have criticized Kerry and called into question the decorations he received for his service combat. O'Neill is associated with the newly formed group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which held a press conference on May 4 that was promoted by the Media Research Center's Cybercast News Service and highlighted by The Drudge Report on May 3. According to Cybercast News, "Hundreds of former commanders and military colleagues of presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry are set to declare in a signed letter that he is 'unfit to be commander-in-chief.'"

The Heritage Foundation's website Townhall.com became a vehicle for bringing O'Neill back to the current media spotlight. On April 2, Townhall.com published a syndicated column by Mona Charen -- and on April 8, David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine published a timeline by Winter Solider.com -- both making brief mention of a 1971 debate between Kerry and O'Neill on The Dick Cavett Show in which O'Neill accused Kerry of lying about the activities and conduct of American military forces in Vietnam.

On April 20, O'Neill made his cable debut on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports. During the interview, O'Neill said that John Kerry told "damaging lies" about war crimes in Vietnam. He said, "We know the truth and we know that [John Kerry] is unfit to be the commander in chief." O'Neill continued, "I think you'll find people are very, very angry at John Kerry. They remember his career in Vietnam as a short, controversial one. And they believe only Hollywood could turn this guy into a war hero. I saw some war heroes, Wolf. John Kerry is not a war hero. He couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11."

Though Blitzer acknowledged that questions were likely to be raised about whether O'Neill was speaking out against Kerry for political reasons, Blitzer conceded that he had not looked into O'Neill's partisan affiliations. "Maybe you're a Republican -- I have no idea -- or the Bush people are encouraging you," Blitzer said.

Houston lawyer John O'Neill is a Republican -- as the Houston Chronicle noted the day after O'Neill's interview with Blitzer. According to the paper, O'Neill voted in the 1998 Republican state primary. But O'Neill's ties to the Republican Party extend far beyond party affiliation. During the CNN interview, Blitzer reported that former President Richard Nixon had urged O'Neill to publicly counter Kerry on The Dick Cavett Show, but there is more to the story. O'Neill was a creation of the Nixon administration, as Joe Klein detailed in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker. Former Nixon special counsel Chuck Colson told Klein that Kerry was an "articulate" and "credible leader" of those veterans calling for an end to the Vietnam War and therefore "an immediate target of the Nixon Administration." As such, the Nixon administration found it necessary to "create a counterfoil" to Kerry. Colson recounted, "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group." Articles from the April 21 Houston Chronicle and the June 17, 2003, Boston Globe confirm close ties between O'Neill and the Nixon administration.

Beyond his role in the Nixon administration's strategy to undermine Kerry in the 1970s, O'Neill is also connected to Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist (a Nixon appointee) and to former President George H.W. Bush, according to Houston Chronicle articles from March 31 and April 21. In the late 1970s, O'Neill clerked for Rehnquist; in 1990, according to an October 7, 1991, report by Texas Lawyer, the former President Bush considered O'Neill for a federal judgeship vacancy. "



Take care all.

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Originally Posted by ShlupQuack

I change the channel. Usually works.

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But that still doesn't help the fact that it encourages ignorance and spews misinformation. It caters to dumb people, because it's easy to trick a dumb person into voting for you. (And the majority of the population is dumb.)

I know the feeling. Whilst the British General Election was going on, many of the discussions/"policies" involved either Michael Howard slagging off Tony Blair, Tony Blair slagging off Michael Howard, or Charles Kennedy actually trying to address issues.

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But that still doesn't help the fact that it encourages ignorance and spews misinformation. It caters to dumb people, because it's easy to trick a dumb person into voting for you. (And the majority of the population is dumb.)

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Sad but true.