Television campaign advertisements are the most visible sign most people have to guide them during an election year. We are bombarded with short ads extolling the virtues, or disadvantages, of each candidate; but what do they really say? What are they designed to say? Drawing on the techniques of visual rhetoric pioneered by Roland Barthes and promoted by Ann Tyler, we will discover that these ads rarely give us the truth about the candidates. Specifically, a recent Scott Brown campaign ad showing us just how special his pickup truck is; and an opposing ad by Martha Coakley that makes Brown out to be a rape-loving fascist. Truth, however, is a dangerous word and a relative concept, especially in politics. Burroughs said that “Nothing is true,” and I am inclined to agree. We could peel back layers of truth like an onion for 1000 pages, but let's not try to deconstruct the universe here. In this essay, “truth” will refer to the candidates' actions versus what these ads try to make us believe about them. Does the “truth” about how they conduct their business as politicians match the “truth” of the advertising narrative? In fact, I will argue that these two ideas are so far apart that they make advertisements irrelevant to what we assume their purpose is; informing us of our best choice based on the candidate's morals and, by extension, their platform. This, in fact, is not the purpose of these ads at all. Their aim is to scam you and manipulate your emotions. To create your own truth that will hopefully spread like wildfire and become the truth of the majority. In his groundbreaking (and tongue-twistering) "Rhetoric of the Image" Roland Barthes introduces two powerful ideas as he examines...... half the paper... ....ed with connoted images that took me six pages to examine a combined minute of footage. To ascertain any degree of truth from these ads, we must examine them one after the other against what we know of the candidate's personal and professional life, thus rendering the ads useless in the first place. Ultimately, all we are doing is trying to analyze the false narrative of a secondary source instead of going directly to the primary sources themselves. Is this how you want to proceed when choosing who will make important decisions about your life and the state of your country? Next time the candidate you voted for does something that goes against his advertised principles, don't get angry at him; be mad at yourself if you voted based on a commercial. After all, truth in advertising law only applies to purchased goods, not to people.