To my mind, there's actually something much worse than a nasty negative attack ad, and that's a saccharine, upbeat positive ad. To me this is worse than coarsening culture, it's dulling culture, it's taking what should be an exciting rough and tumble debate and turning it into a boring syrupy goo.

Whether or not you view a political ad as "negative" often depends on your partisan political point of view. The NDP recently released a negative T.V. attack ad that is so blatantly negative it almost comes across as an attack ad parody. Yet when I went on Twitter and described it as such, I was immediately met with protests. How can you ban something like attack ads when political partisans don't believe they exist?