You’ve got to love when the cam­paign sea­son rolls around in politics.

As our cur­rent Governor Jennifer Granholm is prepar­ing to leave office on Nov. 2, demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­nee Virg Bernero and repub­li­can nom­i­nee Rick Snyder are gear­ing up to bat­tle it out to claim the soon-to-be vacant Governor’s position.

And how can you tell they are get­ting ready to duke it out? Oh, it’s the attack ads, of course.

Although the can­di­dates have mostly stayed quiet since claim­ing their respec­tive party’s nom­i­na­tions, the air war finally kicked off in the past few weeks as the state demo­c­ra­tic party ran its first attack ad on Snyder, accus­ing him of ship­ping jobs over­seas when he was an exec­u­tive of Gateway Computer.

So as the game usu­ally goes, the repub­li­can party and Mr. Snyder volleyed back with an ad accus­ing Bernero of spend­ing thou­sands of tax­payer dol­lars on his office aquarium’s clean­ing costs, per­son­al­ized pen­cils and his din­ing services.

We all know politi­cians spend tax­payer dol­lars on things we’d rather not have them spend our money on, but when politi­cians have to dig and dig to find any sort of infor­ma­tion in order to throw an oppo­nent under the bus, the whole polit­i­cal land­scape has turned into a high school lunch room with the can­di­dates spread­ing gos­sip like a group of 16-year-old girls.

While I under­stand the whole nature of pol­i­tics and the ridicu­lous mud­sling­ing that it pro­duces, these ads do noth­ing more than try and pro­voke fear in the mind of the voter.

Voters are ambushed with ads that do noth­ing but dig up skele­tons from the past, but the prob­lem does not lie within the adver­tis­ing, but with the voters.

So many peo­ple are will­ing to spout off facts from attack ads all too fre­quently, when they can just as eas­ily put in a lit­tle effort and actu­ally look up how a can­di­date has voted and what their val­ues are.

And that is a sad fact in our soci­ety today, that many peo­ple are will­ing to form opin­ions in key polit­i­cal issues with­out the slight­est bit of research.

With this in mind, we all have to do our due dili­gence when it comes to vot­ing and polit­i­cal issues. Just think about it, who­ever gets elected in the end of this race will be the gov­er­nor of Michigan for four years until the next election.

So don’t you believe that you should at least take some time to research the peo­ple you will be vot­ing for? n