Poll this! Investigate that!

Among the many troubling aspects of this election have been the over-the-top negative ads and the news analyses that transform polling results into reality.

If these ads are so effective, why isn’t Coors running negative ads about Bud? Or Cherrios slamming Wheaties?

Maybe corporations know that tearing down the competition only turns off consumers. Do I really need to drink beer? Especially since they started the beer-belly wars?

And given a choice between “The Breakfast of Steroid-Using ‘Chumpions’” and “the Little Round Nothings,” I’ll opt for eggs.

The corporations obviously see this as destructive of the marketplace. So why don’t the geniuses running the political campaigns see negative ads as destructive of democrary?

Then there are the pundits who pontificate on the results of elections that haven’t been held. If they can do that, why don’t they tell us about what’s going to happen after the election of 2012? Why weren’t they telling us about the “rise” of the Tea Party on election eve in 2008?

I suppose that last one is an honest question. The folks who brought us this recession (and are profiting mightily from it) must have known that the lumpen would be pissed. An obvious strategy was to capture the anger and put it to work to keep shifting the money to the rich.

Tell me again: what does extending tax breaks for the wealthy have to do with cutting the deficit?

And remind me: why should insurance companies NOT be required to cover folks with pre-existing conditions?

The media need to stop spending money on talking heads and hire (or rehire) investigative reporters.

The sleuths might start with this timely query: Just who is really financing the Tea Party? And why? And how about the sequel: what do they have up their sleeves for 2012? Whatever it is, you can bet it is in the works NOW!

My Mom offers advice on negative political ads

With local TV following every nanosecond of the President's visit to Portland, and the Giants and the Phillies locked in a tight playoff game on the screen, tonight I found myself logging an inordinate amount of tube time.

It's pretty scary because in between the president and the boys of October, the screen space was papered with wall-to-wall political ads, nearly all of them mean-spirited and toxic.

The impression these negative ads leave is that no matter whom you vote for, you are playing a fool's game. The result is certain disaster. Congress will be inhabited by miserable, thieving degenerate louts — be they Republicans or Democrats.

The message: the situation is utterly hopeless.

I wonder whether anyone has ever stood back and looked at the media mud slinging and realized that the effect is to tear down our system of governance.

No wonder folks are angry. From the looks of things, they should be. The ads are almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perhaps we deserve this. Something is seriously wrong when political mud-wrestling passes as civic discourse. And of course the media, which sell ad space at grossly inflated prices (thereby creating political dependency on big-money interests), are laughing all the way to the bank.

Ask yourself, who are the winners here?

Certainly not the public.

My Mother, bless her soul, used to say, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." If only the politicians and their media advisers would listen to Mom's quaint advice.

As for those of us on the receiving end of this sludge, we might follow the corollary: "If you can't hear or see anything nice in the media, turn it off."