Congressional campaign season is heating up, and that means plenty of screaming press releases and commercials from candidates.

Unfortunately, many of those communications have little redeeming value for the electorate because they're designed solely to create a bad and often misleading image of an opponent. One of the most common tactics we've seen this year is to single out individual campaign contributions for specific candidates, look for any kind of dirt imaginable on those donors and then put out a statement calling on the candidate to give back the tainted money.

It's not an approach that's unique to one party or one candidate. We've seen it, frankly, from all the major party candidates running for congressional district seats that cover Cayuga County.

The latest came this week from U.S. Rep. Michael Arcuri's campaign, who said his opponent in the 24th Congressional District, Richard Hanna, should return a donation from the National Republican Congressional Committee because that group's platform advocates some form of privatizing Social Security. An Arcuri campaign spokesman said Hanna wants “gamble away” Social Security as a result of this connection.

It's one thing to engage an opponent in a debate over policy - that's actually something we like to see. But it's preposterous to suggest that an opponent should give back money from his party's congressional campaign committee, and to essentially claim that failure to give the money back means he wants to “gamble away” Social Security.

To be fair, we've seen it go both ways. Hanna has attacked Arcuri over campaign funds coming from outside his district in an attempt to portray him as someone who ignores his constituents. This claim overlooks the fact that Arcuri has received some 1,500 contributions from donors within the district, compared with about 200 in-district donors for Hanna.

We've seen similar games played with campaign finance reports by candidates in the 25th Congressional District.

The point here is not to portray any of these candidates as inferior. It's simply to ask them to stop wasting precious time with these hollow claims about their opponents.