Politics is a very dirty game and not everyone is cut out for it. As the old saying goes if you can not handle the heat then get yo ass out the kitchen. Also SO WHAT is they distort your words I mean my God just turn the tables and twist theirs… Here is an article I read at Politico…
This year’s attack ads cut deeper
Forget about ads featuring soft-on-crime accusations, cherry-picked tax votes or claims of ideological extremism.
This year, both parties are rolling out ads that take negative campaigning to another level. Candidates have been accused of wanting to gas house pets, inject young girls with dangerous drugs, let men beat their wives, and assist child molesters, whether by buying them Viagra or protecting their privacy. The soft-on-rape ads that have aired this cycle seem almost tame by comparison.
While candidates have always attacked one another, distorted one another’s records and taken each other’s statements grossly out of context, this year’s collection of napalm-flavored attack ads are a notch beyond the standard election-year criticisms.
The target politicians, according to their opponents, aren’t just untrustworthy or inexperienced. They’re flat out cruel and depraved.
How depraved? How about a monster who wants to kill innocent puppies? That guy is running for governor of Illinois.
“Bill Brady’s first priority was to sponsor a bill that would mass-euthanize sheltered dogs and cats in gas chambers,” the narrator of a web video for incumbent Pat Quinn says, indignantly, in reference to the Democratic governor’s Republican opponent.
Cut to a woman holding a little fluffy dog.
“Shame on Bill Brady,” she says. “I am a Republican, but I don’t support him for the mass euthanization of animals.” Then she turns to kiss the dog. Another woman, holding a dog on a leash, also says she’s a Republican, but “that’s sick and wrong.”
As the ad fades to black, the dog barks.
It’s not that ads like that one are complete lies, necessarily. Brady, a state senator, did propose a bill that would allow shelter animals to be euthanized in groups rather than one at a time, as they are now; it would have saved the cash-starved shelters money. (He withdrew the bill shortly after.) PolitiFact rated the ad “half true,” a far cry from its worst rating, “pants on fire.”
But the ads suggest something very different than being dishonest, wrong on the issues or dangerously naïve. Instead, the implication is that the candidate is malevolent and perhaps even sick. The message: don’t just vote against this guy because you disagree with him– do it because he might be a sociopath.
“I’ve been in this business for 38 years, and every cycle there are hysterical observations that the spots this cycle are the most negative, the dirtiest, the lowest ever,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic media consultant. “It’s generally never true. But there’s a critical distinction” between contrasts and demonization, he said.
This is, after all, the first election in which a candidate has felt compelled to declare that she is “not a witch.”
South suggests there is a point at which the way-over-the-top attacks become counterproductive.
“There does come a point where voters start saying to themselves, ‘Could anybody who’s not in jail be that bad?’” he said. “Voters are predisposed to believe the worst about politicians, but at some point, common sense kicks in, and they say, ‘Nobody could be that bad and be walking around the streets.’”
But that hasn’t stopped some ad-makers. A Democratic Governors Association ad opens with a shot of a pair of white-gloved hands inserting a syringe into a dainty forearm.
“This is the arm of an 11-year-old girl,” the narrator says. “Now, imagine a governor who wanted to take a needle, fill it with a controversial drug for sexually transmitted diseases, and inject it in every 11- and 12-year-old girl in Texas. That’s what Governor Rick Perry wanted to do.”
As the ad fades to black, the dog barks.
It’s not that ads like that one are complete lies, necessarily. Brady, a state senator, did propose a bill that would allow shelter animals to be euthanized in groups rather than one at a time, as they are now; it would have saved the cash-starved shelters money. (He withdrew the bill shortly after.) PolitiFact rated the ad “half true,” a far cry from its worst rating, “pants on fire.”
But the ads suggest something very different than being dishonest, wrong on the issues or dangerously naïve. Instead, the implication is that the candidate is malevolent and perhaps even sick. The message: don’t just vote against this guy because you disagree with him– do it because he might be a sociopath.
“I’ve been in this business for 38 years, and every cycle there are hysterical observations that the spots this cycle are the most negative, the dirtiest, the lowest ever,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic media consultant. “It’s generally never true. But there’s a critical distinction” between contrasts and demonization, he said.
This is, after all, the first election in which a candidate has felt compelled to declare that she is “not a witch.”
South suggests there is a point at which the way-over-the-top attacks become counterproductive.
“There does come a point where voters start saying to themselves, ‘Could anybody who’s not in jail be that bad?’” he said. “Voters are predisposed to believe the worst about politicians, but at some point, common sense kicks in, and they say, ‘Nobody could be that bad and be walking around the streets.’”
But that hasn’t stopped some ad-makers. A Democratic Governors Association ad opens with a shot of a pair of white-gloved hands inserting a syringe into a dainty forearm.
“This is the arm of an 11-year-old girl,” the narrator says. “Now, imagine a governor who wanted to take a needle, fill it with a controversial drug for sexually transmitted diseases, and inject it in every 11- and 12-year-old girl in Texas. That’s what Governor Rick Perry wanted to do.”
Much of the barrage, it turns out, actually comes from skittish incumbents who, realizing that voters aren’t happy with them, know their only hope is to make their challengers seem intolerable—or unthinkable.
“If you let someone become an acceptable alternative to the status quo in this environment, you’re asking for a loss,” said Republican media consultant Brian Nick.
One of 2010’s most notorious incumbent-produced ads, Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson’s “Taliban Dan” attack on his House challenger, Daniel Webster, is thought by many political insiders to have backfired and actually helped the Republican.
“Religious fanatics try to take away our freedom in Afghanistan, in Iran, and right here in central Florida,” the narrator says.
The idea that Webster “tried to deny battered women medical care and the right to divorce their abusers” was a stretch: As it turns out, he had introduced a failed bill to allow couples to voluntarily enter into “covenant marriages” that would be harder to dissolve than the regular kind.
“That kind of an ad is ridiculous,” said John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who authored the book, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. “You’ve got to have faith that the public can sort that out. The public isn’t necessarily going to swallow that. Usually when somebody makes these kinds of claims that are totally outlandish, it’s out of desperation.”
Geer likened these ads to the spot by John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008 that claimed Barack Obama favored sex education for 6-year-olds. “It was a preposterous claim,” he said, and it was greeted largely with disbelief.
One of the best places to watch the hyper-negative ad drama unfold, in all its vulgarity, is Nevada. While Sen. Harry Reid and his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, don’t have much in common, they can agree on one thing: their opponent has a soft spot for child molesters. That’s the message bombarding Nevada voters, if they haven’t already turned off their televisions to shut out the two aggressive, well-funded campaigns’ spots.
“Reid actually voted to use taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra for convicted child molesters and sex offenders,” a disgusted woman says in one of Angle’s most recent ads.
“Sharron Angle voted to protect the privacy of sex offenders instead of the safety of our kids,” a local therapist says in one of Reid’s spots. The words onscreen read: “Sharron Angle voted to protect sex offenders.”
In the most high-profile contest to date this year, January’s Massachusetts special Senate election, the approach failed to yield a victory. In that race, Democrat Martha Coakley’s campaign aired a spot claiming that Republican Scott Brown, “favors letting hospitals deny emergency contraception to rape victims.”
That much was true. But the message, distilled onscreen, was more blunt: “Deny care to rape victims.” A mailer further sharpened the idea: “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away.”
In denouncing the ad, Brown’s daughter found it necessary to clarify, “He’s kind, understanding, and he’s a very compassionate father.”
“Everybody has that nuclear bomb in their arsenal that they’re waiting to pull out in the last couple of weeks of October,” said Nick, the GOP consultant. “You pull the pin on the grenade, and you hope you don’t blow yourself up at the same time.”
The STR 