That other guy is a puppy-kicker, hates grandma, and thinks you are fat!

It's getting to be campaign season again! Oh boy! I can't wait, all these commercials that deify candidate A while demonizing candidate B. A few years back, a man named Jason Allen was running for state senate and his campaign was running a bunch of ridiculous ads. I don't remember exactly but they all had a dramatic voice saying something like "Jason Allen formed a committee that prevented the extinction of the wood duck." While, I appreciate that they weren't smear ads and were focusing on his accomplishments, unless Mr. Allen is a superhero of some sort there was a little bit of exaggeration involved. Maybe it was the dramatic way they were said or the intensity of the announcers voice, but the similarity between the ads and the Chuck Norris meme did not escape my two young sons. Soon the commercial would come on and one of them would say "Jason Allen invented scotch tape but let someone else take credit because he didn't need the money" or "Jason Allen worked with the Babylonians on the development of zero" or "Jason Allen advised Alexander the Great on strategies to consolidate his empire" (*side note - I have strange but intelligent children) and many many others.
I'd still take a campaign like that over a smear campaign any day. Towards the end of the last presidential race I was waiting for the McCain-Palin camp to break out "Sarah Palin may be a woman but at least she's white" or something like that. I do recall seeing one run on election day during The Price Is Right that showed a weird cardboard-cut-out-looking Obama in a rowboat in the middle of a stormy sea saying something along the lines of "Obama's policies would sink our nation and we'll all die horrible deaths at the hands of terrorists" -not exactly that but similar enough to be shocking.
I predict this campaign season will see some of the most ridiculous hyperbole to date. "That other guy is the devil incarnate! He wants to defile your firstborn sons and eat your dogs." "The other candidate is a closet zombie. He will cut funding to medicare so he can eat Grandma's brain!" "My opponent uses baby seals as clubs to beat baby whales!" "Candidate B wants to sleep with your spouse and has supported legislation that would require all toasters to only have one setting - burn everything!"
I fear it will be far more nefarious and dangerous than that..."My opponent believes responsible use of fiscal and monetary policy can ease the economy out of a recession and prevent a depression! That's a lie! Good ol' American ingenuity is what will save our economy. Let banks fail! If people lose their life savings, it's their own fault for putting it in a risky bank! I support trade reduction and tariffs as a way to boost internal production! We need to have fixed exchange rates to show the world our dollar is better! We need to spend more money proving our military dominance to the world and less money on research and development of unnecessary new technologies! We already have good ol' American technology, why would we need new ones? 'Green' Technologies are for hippies, we'll never run out of oil! We're number one, we're perfect as we are, it's everyone else that needs to change!"