Campaign season is one of the most exciting times in a democratic society. It is a yearly reminder that all Americans are indeed active members of their government and need not passively accept the policies that sometimes seem dictated from on high.Unfortunately, the pitfalls of democracy also become blindingly clear around this time of year. There is a general dumbing-down of complex political discussion, often into sentence-long tag lines or banners that come to dominate the political climate. Nowhere is this trend more evident than on television campaign ads.

As a disclaimer, I am probably already biased against televised campaign commercials because I find the very concept of them existentially confusing.

Why, in this one medium of political discourse, are politicians so honest about the fact that they are openly trying to "sell" themselves to constituents? More importantly, how could any politician believe that it only takes 30 seconds to win my vote?

The intended purpose of campaign commercials cannot be to educate viewers to allow them to make informed decisions at the polls.

These politicians are merely making emotional appeals to viewers by calling each other liars and hypocrites and pulling out-of-context quotes from previous speeches in order to distort one another's opinions.

Some campaign commercials go beyond this standard of general uselessness and are downright childish and offensive.

A recent Massachusetts advertisement created and sponsored by Republican congressional candidate Sean Bielat took a cheap shot at his opponent, Representative Barney Frank.

The bulk of the commercial is an animated clip of a cartoon body attached to an image of Frank's head dancing underneath an illuminated disco ball while the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG logos float past in the background.

The advertisement suggests that Frank, as chair of the House Financial Services committee, is largely to blame for the current financial crisis. It achieves the impressive feat of being simultaneously uninformative and unfunny.

Depending on personal interpretation, the advertisement could be-and has been seen-as offensive to homosexuals in its mockery of gay stereotypes, as the political blog Talking Points Memo describes the ad's depiction of the openly gay Frank "as a hip-swerving disco queen in a rumpled suit."

Advertisements like this are an insult to voters' intelligence. Furthermore, I find it incredible that intelligent politicians like Bielat are comfortable running such deintellectualized and crude advertising campaigns.

Bielat is not a down-home politician in the breed of Sarah Palin, who capitalizes on her lack of sophistication.

He holds a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and master's degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and he does not seem to downplay his intelligence as many Republican candidates have in recent months.

It is especially disheartening to see this kind of conduct among political figures who should know better.

As I mentioned, there is also the possibility that these ads are part of a trend of "dumbing-down" political discourse on TV. At question is the extent to which television as a medium for political propaganda is effective and appropriate, but perhaps the deceptive nature of these ads is not out of character with the rest of the political climate on TV.

The educational content of nightly news programs such as the O'Reilly Factor and The Countdown with Keith Olbermann is limited to say the least, and the television shows have become little more than shouting matches between talking heads.

If television had ever been a functional medium by which citizens could educate themselves about politics, it certainly no longer is today.

These are not new problems, nor are they unique to this year's election.

As the national political climate becomes increasingly partisan, television becomes a battleground for immature attacks like Bielat's, and attack ads are part of this political expression.

Hopefully, the majority of Americans are educated enough to see past these attempts by politicians to manipulate and sway their votes and are capable of making informed decisions free of the influence of political slander.