Too many lies in political ads

As of Friday, October 29, 2010

Editor:

Am I the only one who is fed up and disgusted by the continuous barrage of lies we are subjected to during political campaigns? Do these ad writers think that the entire voting public is so ignorant as to believe all of the unfounded false statements that they fabricate?

I will not discuss parties because they are all guilty at all levels of government. Just once I would like to hear a television ad with a candidate telling me what they plan to do for me and how they will accomplish it, not some outlandish claim that cannot be accomplished by one person in one term, or an attack on their opponent.

We no longer vote for the best person for the job based on qualifications, we vote for the best liar, the person whose lies are harder to disprove.

With the massive amount of information available at the stroke of a key, it is getting harder to filter out truth from all of the garbage because the liars seem to be extremely prolific in their postings.

My ballot will be a mix of candidates of different parties based on merit and their stand on issues. This type of voting can only be done after many hours of research. I have the time and the desire to do this research but a large number of voters don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could believe what we are told without digging for the truth?

I believe that we got into this condition because of poor interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution by an overzealous panel of judges. Lying is protected by the First Amendment and only the courts can decide if a lie is prosecutable.

Maybe we should look at our judges, those who would encourage the fabrications by looking the other way instead of making our elections truly clean elections.

Chuck Burns

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Gary Austin 2 years, 6 months ago

There is a common logical fallacy known by the Latin term, non sequitur.  If you were to go online and look up this term it would likely be explained by simply showing a Terry Goddard campaign commercial. 
Hands down my favorite Goddard commercial is his own version of the Willie Horton ad that sunk Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential election.  Goddard essentially blames Jan Brewer for a recent prison escape in this ad, as if the Governor was the head of the prison security detail or was standing in a guard tower with a machine gun and a floodlight watching the prison fence that night.  For those of you who may have missed the commercial, it states that lax procedures allowed some prisoners to escape and the way private prison corporations get away with this is by calling the governor.  Also a lobbyist for the private prison is an advisor to the governor and Brewer’s campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from this corporation.   So the storyline is that a private corporation wanted some convicts to escape from their prison and go on a killing spree, so they called the governor for help.  To further their nefarious scheme they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Brewer’s gubernatorial campaign—even though she has never campaigned for governor until just now.  And since she knows one of their lobbyists, she is somehow completely guilty of this grand conspiracy.  Case closed!  Talk about non sequitur.
This commercial is so patently absurd and nonsensical that it is practically an endorsement for Jan Brewer.  Brewer has been in political office since 1983; with that much public material to pick through a sixth grader could make Mother Theresa look like Charles Manson.  If this is the best they could do, she must be doing a great job.  Conversely, if she is doing a bad job and this is all Goddard and his entire campaign staff could come up with, they must not be too bright.  
Goddard’s website states that as attorney general he has taken on drug cartels, meth dealers, etc.  Wow, he did his job!  What else could he do?  That would be like a police officer saying, “As a policeman I wrote speeding tickets; therefore, you should make me mayor.”  Goddard goes on to state that he will use his experience as attorney general to build Arizona’s economy.  There is absolutely no relationship between those two things.  Relevant experience would be Jan Brewer becoming the chairwoman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in 1996, inheriting a 165 million dollar deficit and turning it into one of the financially strongest counties in the nation by 2002.  Inheriting the Governorship of Arizona with debt and crazy bookkeeping then improving it dramatically would be another example of pertinent experience.  
If anyone can make sense of Terry “non sequitur” Goddard’s campaign commercials, please write in and illuminate the rest of us.

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