Dear Editor
The next Saskatchewan election has been set for Nov. 7, 2011. Unless I'm even worse in math than I think, that's over a year away. But I'm already seeing pure election ads on TV. What's going on? The Sask. Party has a majority in the legislature, so maybe these election ads of theirs could be a sign that they plan to pull a Stephen Harper and call an election earlier. But, maybe not.
This latest ad - again a personal attack against the NDP leader - accuses Dwain Lingenfelter of (among other almost equally strange things) having caused the emmigration of many young people out of the province. Really? It was a short ad, so I guess there wasn't room in it to discuss the possible motive.
I used to live in the United States, where that sort of ad has become a regular feature of political life. There elections have become perpetual, with a new one starting up right after the votes have been counted on the last one. Unfortunately, attack ads seem to be effective there, resulting in a lot of folks voting against people and ideas, rather than voting for anything, other than perhaps vague patriotic, pee group or religious generalities.
Of course, there are still a number of folks in the States who don't fall for that kind of nastiness, and there are still some politicians there who try not to resort to the kind of tactics that were so successful, for awhile, for Paul Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. But it is probably hard not to respond in kind to personal attacks, so the result can be a general lowering of the the quality of the political debate. When that happens, we are all the losers.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
