This proposal may be interesting for internet blog debate, but in terms of reality, it is simple-minded and wide open for manipulation and abuse. God help us if such a scheme were ever implemented.

When they say different things and make different promises depending upon which audience they are facing at them moment, and when every word, phrasing, etc is so carefully planned for the image it will convey to X voter, honesty gets completely lost in the dust.

If their whole image is a lie, how would you decide when to fine them?
(It’d take a whole team of lawyers to prove it enough to make it stick. And I imagine that the candidate’s lawyers could keep any judgement delayed at least until an election is over, good luck getting any money from them.)

I like your idea, but I have no confidence that it could actually work. IMO it’d just make them find loopholes and more subtle ways to tell the same lies, so that they could get away with them without *quite* going over the threshold of provable-lie to trigger the punishment.

Considering the skill that those in the political system have for finding loopholes in everything else, don’t you think they’d find them in this too?

right now they won’t speak truth. you propose a rule guaranteeing that they can’t speak their minds. why would that be any better?

this is why speech rights should not be left to engineers. our system ain’t perfect, but this is actually a feature, not a bug. the problem is that most people will vote for liars without checking for truth, not that politicians lie about each other. they lie about everything.

Why can’t everyone think like you?

Since everyone doesn’t think like you and I, or at least since the majority of Americans don’t think like you and I, I’ll be straightforward about it, McCain is going to win.

I’d hate to see it happen.

But he will.

Trump just endorsed him tonight on the Larry King show; obviously because he knows McCain is simply going to cut taxes on the rich and raise them on the middle and lower class.

Not that Trump has any influence on votes, but rather, “look who’s voting for McCain”.

Obama’s doing the complete opposite.

But dirty, filthy, dishonest ads, will surely brainwash non-critical thinking society — as it already has.

We’re going to lose.

It is because of this that I believe ALL political advertisements should be illegal and instead we should interrupt our normally scheduled crap tv with debates and actual discussions. It is pathetic that I can watch more hours of family guy in a single day than I can watch of our candidates debating the issues (if they will talk about the issues at all) for their entire campaign.

In this case, I’d say he *could* criticize the Bush administration because he’s not running against Bush. It’s like they’ve said for healthy communication, “use ‘I’ language.” “I will do this, I won’t do that, I propose this, etc.” It would then be up to McCain to do the same and one would hope a voter could make the candidate-comparisons on their own (rather than letting these “I approve this message…” BS do it for them).