2014's fast food atrocities
Burger King's black cheeseburger: Made with squid ink and bamboo charcoal, arguably a symbol of meat's destructive effect on the planet. Only available in Japan.
Wednesday, Aug 27, 2014 12:30 PM UTC
4 dumbest campaign ads of 2014: Karl Rove’s cynicism, Ebola panic, and firing guns at TVs!
As we near the formal general election season, impossibly stupid ads are emerging everywhere. Let's mock them VIDEO
Topics: 2014 elections, Karl Rove, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor, Video, Campaign ads, Simpson-Bowles, Tom Cotton, Dan Sullivan, Guns, Allen Weh, Editor's Picks, Politics News
It would have been nicer if it could have waited a week, until after Labor Day, so everyone could “refresh their batteries” before having to deal with it. But the inevitable Cambrian Explosion of masterfully stupid general election ads has arrived this week as campaigns pivot away from the primary battles of yore and into the dark, depressing homeward stretch.
By Tuesday afternoon, four of the most ludicrous attack ads of the cycle had already appeared this week, and Science suggests that they will keep getting dumber as Election Day nears.
Let’s make fun of them.
Here’s the first installment of General Election Stupid Ad Watch, a recurring Salon Politics feature that will appear each … week? … month? … let’s go with “whenever a fresh batch of dumb ads comes out all at once and thus can be easily aggregated into a single column.”
Here’s an ad from Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove’s “social welfare” nonprofit, attacking Sen. Kay Hagan for wanting to raise the Social Security retirement age, increase out-of-pocket Medicare expenses, and reduce the mortgage interest tax deduction. It’s similar to the ad Crossroads ran last week against Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor in that it attacks Democrats from the left.
If anyone watches either of these ads and is convinced that they need to vote for a Republican Senate candidate in order to safeguard against cuts to Social Security and Medicare, God help this country. (There will probably a bunch of people who do exactly that! Where’s your God now? Ha ha ha … ehh.)
As Greg Sargent notes, the citation in the Hagan ad is to an old interview in which she says some generally nice things about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. Pryor and Hagan probably employ some shitty advisers who told them, Well, you’re Democrats in conservative districts, so you should nominally support this Smart Centrist plan to prove your deficit-cutting bona fides, without realizing that the reason Simpson-Bowles went nowhere is because no one likes it and it contains features that are politically unpopular. Let that be a lesson to Democrats in red states: Don’t try to win over conservative voters by supporting deficit reduction, because major deficit reduction — as in, non-”take away food from poor people” stuff — is unpopular among them too, which is why it hasn’t happened.
Jim Newell covers politics and media for Salon.
More Jim Newell.
