Ad nauseum.

The list of people offended by Super Bowl commercials continues to grow.

Snickers pulled their ad, which featured two men accidentally kissing and reacting violently, after protests from gay rights groups. The NRA (National Restaurant Association) protested the Kevin Federline Nationwide ad because of the way it portrayed fast food workers.

And now comes this:

What was so offensive about that? Apparently, the idea of a robot committing suicide. Never mind the fact that robots cannot die, because they’re robots. Suicide prevention groups were still up in arms.

The New York-based American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says it started getting complaints the day after the ad aired and as of Thursday had fielded more than 250 e-mails or calls. It wants GM to pull the ad from its Web site, try to get it off video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube and apologize.

“It was inappropriate to use depression and suicide as a way to sell cars,” said Robert Gebbia, the foundation’s executive director.

Because if there’s anything that inspires someone to suicide, it’s the sight of an inanimate object doing the same. After initially defending the ad, General Motors relented, pulling the spot from television — with plans to remove the ad from YouTube as well.

The GM robot ad was the second Super Bowl ad pulled from television, and the third to attract the derision of some special interest group with too much time on its hands. While this might reflect badly on the Super Bowl, and hence the NFL, there is slight consolation in the fact that the league succeeded in preventing yet another possibly controversial ad from ever making the air.

An ad recruiting people to join the Border Patrol was rejected by the league in part because it mentioned terrorism. This truncated quote was edited by the right-wing Hot Air blog:

The ad ?was specific to border patrol and mentioned terrorists,? he said. ?The game was in Miami, where [immigration] is a sensitive political issue?[it] made us a little bit uncomfortable.??

This is along the same lines as an advertisement by liberal website MoveOn.org being rejected prior to Super Bowl XXXVIII. The main difference in that situation was that the ad was rejected by CBS, not the NFL.

There are those (Lou Dobbs and his followers come to mind) who would rail against the NFL for rejecting the ad. However, unlike the other three ads — none of which could have offended anyone with even the slightest thick skin — an ad for the Border Patrol concerning a divisive issue like immigration should have been rejected. The last thing true sports fans want is a dose of political reality, and the last thing the NFL needs to do is take sides on any political, religious or cultural issue.

Mentioning hot button, cross-cutting issues like immigration and terrorism in a commercial would have caused infinitely more protests than the three controversial ads that actually hit the airwaves. The resulting storm of controversy would have shone the kind of political spotlight on the NFL that the league hasn’t seen since the Janet Jackson disaster in 2004.