We all have seen it. It starts with the black screen. The depressing music begins in the background. Dramatic statements appear across the screen and then with a groan, we are subjected to 30 seconds of pointless slander. It is a political campaign ad for the 2012 presidential election.

Although exaggerated and not the same for everyone, this description isn’t too far off. The 2012 election has contained many ridiculous and slanderous ads so far, and it doesn’t look like it will stop.

These ads have falsely accused governor Mitt Romney of, among many other claims, indirectly killing a woman and president Barack Obama of ‘gutting’ Medicare. The ads have also served as a time to point fingers as shown in a recent ad complaining about how all Obama does is run negative ads.

All of these ads however, are lacking one important thing, facts. For example, take the Priorities USA Action TV ad that refers to Joe Soptic and his late wife and the GST steel mill that Bain Capital closed down. In this ad, steelworker Joe Soptic claims that his wife contracted cancer and then died soon after. He goes on to say that by closing the steel mill, Romney left his family without health insurance.

This ad is very misleading and according to politifact.org, it is false. The truth is Soptic’s wife had insurance for about a year after the mill’s closing, through her own employer. She then lost her insurance because of a shoulder injury that made her leave her job. The illness occurred four years later and five years after Soptic lost his job.

This is a prime example of going too far. While the ad failed to outrightly state that Romney committed murder, it was implied, leading American voters to believe that Romney murdered a woman. Ads should not be used to defame the character of the opposing nominee. Instead, they should be used to inform the potential voters of why the nominee should be president.

On Obama’s side, many ads have made false claims concerning Medicare. According to one ad, the money that “you paid” is being used for Obama’s health care law. Yet factcheck.org says that the law doesn’t take money out of the existing hospital insurance trust fund, it just cuts the future growth of spending. This also applies to the attack ad that claims Obama is slashing Medicare by $716 billion. In truth, Obama is not taking it from the present budget; he is planning to trim the growth of future spending over the next 10 years.

One of the most slanderous ads that I have seen, so far, is one that claims that re-electing Obama will bring 1,000 years of darkness. This ad is obviously false. As much as anyone might claim, Obama will not bring the end of America. This is sickening to me as the presidential election should be about who has the best solutions to our country’s problems, not spreading lies to the public.

There are too many examples of ads muddling facts, such as the one that says Obama gutted welfare reform by dropping work requirements in welfare. In reality, states now have the power to change the work requirements, so unlike the ad claims, work requirements are not being dropped.

The most recurring ad I have seen claims that Romney shipped jobs overseas to China and Mexico when he worked at Bain Capital and to India when he was governor of Massachusetts. Yet the two examples that referred to China and Mexico occurred after Romney left Bain. In addition, when Romney was the governor, it was not the state that outsourced the contracts; in actuality, Romney simply vetoed a measure that barred the state from working with a state contractor who located state customer-service calls in India.

Unfortunately, these examples just skim the surface of all of the lies that are being spread by political ads this year. In reality, there are still campaign ads that present half-truths. This will mostly likely never stop. So, instead of believing everything one hears, we should scrutinize it and require evidence to back up claims. We should make good use on the internet and research all statements. My favorite fact checking websites are: FactCheck.org, Politifact.org, and FactCheckEd.org. If our generation proves that we care about factual campaigns, then maybe the future presidential nominees will be less willing to run false ads and stop the mudslinging.