Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Do You Really Hate "Negative" Campaign Ads?

Today's e-mail contains a YouGov study suggesting that Americans don't actually hate "negative" campaign ads so much as they hate the term "negative."

Personally, I hate intrusive ads. (I like small, neat, discreet ads tucked in at the bottom of a page.) I'd like to see what would be a logical literal interpretation of "negative campaign ads"...the ads that aren't there, especially in the form of unsolicited campaign phone calls.

However, in this presidential campaign, the smearing and sliming has officially begun as the Democrats try to puff up a dubious story about Mitt Romney's allegedly bullying a school enemy.

A few years ago I wrote a positive Yahoo review of Dreams of My Father. (I'd been asked to write a review of a current bestseller, and that was the one I'd read the week before the payment was offered.) I liked the book, and recommended it. One thing I didn't like about it, though, was Obama's confession of having hatefully rejected the friendship of another child who wanted to buddy up with him because they were in the same ethnic minority at the same school. If it wasn't physical bullying, it certainly pushed the buttons on my memories of social/verbal/emotional bullying. I don't know why the immature, pre-empathy behavior of children and teenagers should be held against the adults they eventually become, since most children who are sent to school both give and receive emotional abuse...but although I find myself visualizing both candidates as having been rich brats, and as a little girl I hated all boys who weren't my brother or cousins, I think my inner child hates the boy Barry more than the boy Mitt.

Not that that has anything to do with voting for adults on the basis of the legislative measures they've proposed, opposed, supported, or whatever. Not that my outer adult doesn't like people whom my inner child wouldn't have liked, or may actually remember having disliked, at age ten. I would still vote for Obama if he'd stood firm on the constitutional basis for not allowing any kind of mandate that any person buy into any insurance gambling scheme. I would still vote for Romney if he'd done the same. The fact is that both of these candidates have proposed legislation that forces individuals to buy into insurance gambling schemes, as adults, and that, rather than any stupid kid stuff they got up to as children, is why I think both are unfit for election, and their fitness even to vote in the United States needs reviewing.

Feeling munificent? Feed this web site's Message Squirrel at salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com. Or overpay for one of those cool new USO T-shirts--scroll down for the link. Or help e-friend and contributor Karen Bracken feed her crew of Volunteers at americadontforget.com.

But if you really have a lot of e-money burning holes in your e-pockets, and need a tax write-off, or just hope the Obomney can bite itself in a fatal spot and expire...

(Note to our foreign readers, who still account for about 40% of all readers: The image here is of two unsatisfactory candidates forming a political monster that may do itself enough political damage to throw the election to someone less disastrous, e.g. Ron Paul. This web site does not recommend physically biting politicians.)

Anyway, the fun-loving guys at www.conservativebytes.com and www.goptrust.com just sent a list of sixteen promising topics for anti-Obama campaign ads. If anybody out there really wants to work on anti-Obama ads, the fun starts over there.

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