This morning, TV again was filled with those horrible,
rotten, lying, distorted, crappy political ads.
If the ads were to be believed – and, most certainly, they are NOT to be
believed – both candidates for Wisconsin Attorney General are horrible lawyers
who spent their legal lives trying to make sure that child molesters don’t go
to prison.
When I first saw the horrible ad against Pat Bomhack,
created by those nice businessmen over on East Wash at Blair (WI Manufacturers
and Commerce), I had no idea who Pat Bomhack was or even what office he was
running for, but I knew immediately that if I could vote for him, I would have
to. The announcer the nice businessmen hired to do the voice track for the
anti-Bomhack ad has the most annoying voice ever heard in the history of
political advertising. As it turns out, I can’t vote for Pat Bomhack, because
he’s running for Dale Schultz’s old senate seat.
My state senator is Fred Risser, the oldest living human
being ever to hold office in Wisconsin, who helped pour water on the state
capitol when it caught fire in 1904.
And then there’s the last-minute smear attempt by the Walker
campaign gurus – who would like us to believe that Mary Burke was fired in
disgrace from her dad’s company, but before she was, she outsourced millions of
jobs to China or Bangladesh or Timbuktu or someplace. Oh, and this “news item”
was broken by a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party….a stupid
little glorified blog….that our state’s “mainstream media” immediately elevated
to the status of respectable news organization by picking up the “news item”
and running it as though it had come from Reuters or the Associated Press. Nice
job, watchdogs.
Don’t expect TV news departments to come down too heavily on
the disgusting sea of garbage foisted on us day and night in the form of “issue
advertising” or “political advertising”.
And don’t get me going on the difference between the two; it’s another
one of those absurd rules the politicians have created for themselves. After
all, it was the landfill of money spent on political ads in 2010 that rescued a
lot of local TV stations, still reeling from the great recession.
And while I’m on the topic….which campaign used the Swastika
as part of its political advertising? That would be Mary Burke’s brain trust. Please
don’t tell me it’s OK to use the Nazi imagery in political advertising, because
it’s not, under any circumstances.
One more race I’d like to mention: the race for U.S. Senate
in Iowa. I have a lot of friends who live in Iowa, and from time to time in my “day
job” I have to cover news in Iowa, so I pay some attention to what’s going on
there. The image above is the one that candidate Joni Ernst first wanted to
portray – motorcycle-riding former soldier and mother, with “conservative values”.
But if you know her name, it’s probably because of the ad
she ran where she talked about growing up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm. The
implication of the ad was that she’d go to Washington and castrate all those big-spenders.
"Make 'em squeal", as she said. That’s the ad the national media picked up on, and the lens through which
candidate Ernst was portrayed on every national news outlet: the
castrator. The national news media never
seem to mention that Ernst is a Michelle Bachman clone, with unbelievable
whacky ideas about what government is, and Ernst’s campaign speeches often
include a line about her military background, and how she’s got a gun and knows
how to use it “in case the government comes after my rights”.
Obama’s Secret Muslim Army is coming to get us all in their
black helicopters, right, Joni?
After the votes are counted tonight, there’ll be a respite
for us; no rotten, negative, lying, disgusting political ads for a while. But in the next election cycle, they’ll be
back, with their dark and brooding images, their outright lies, their
last-minute smears.
Until we clarify the laws about what political advertising
is, and whether money is speech, we’re doomed to repeating the sickening cycle.
