Ricardo J Gonzalez for a Better America

On Memorial day Obama retold a family anecdote, about his uncle coming back from World War II after being one of the first troops in Auschwitz. He told this to a small group of Veterans he was meeting with in Las Cruces. Aparently, the uncle was actually his Mother's uncle, Obama's great-uncle, and the camp was Buchenwald not Aushwitz. This wasn't in a debate, or even a major speech. From the video, it doesn't even seem like he's speaking to more than a dozen people, but it was taken as an opportunity to call him a liar:

"Obama's frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief,"

said an RNC spokesman.
On Politico.com, we have an entire article dedicated to attacking Obama's possible health because, even though his physician says he's in good health, he did smoke cigarettes up until last year. Apparently this is also a crime against the American people, and something that we should all be concerned with.

With McCain, there seems to be more discussion than is warranted on his age. He's the oldest man to ever run for President, and a website titled Things younger than McCain is a particularly entertaining way to make that point. This is a joke that he himself has brought up (see SNL clips). It's funny, and to a certain extent it is relevant, as his age increases the chances that he'll have health issues while in power, but is it really what we should be focusing on?

It's unreasonable to expect the voters to be completely informed on every "issue" and the candidates stance on it. Most people are not going to dedicate a significant portion of their day to compare and analyze the specifics of the various policies. When people are dedicating 15 or 30 minutes of their day to catching up with the news about the campaign, wasting 5 of it with this kind of irrelevant nonsense is borderline irresponsible, and it helps push the election cycle further from a discussion of the merits of policy alternatives, and more towards American Idol: Politics Edition. Our acceptance of this kind of nonsense as news disempowers us as voters, as the campaigns focus less on coming up with better policy, and more on which color ties to use.