Lipstick Traces
Barack Obama, on his week-long tear against the McPalin ticket, plays the analogy card.
"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig."
"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink."
"We've had enough of the same old thing."
The McPalin campaign erupts. Jim Antle has this basically right.
Yes, Palin wears lipstick and compares herself to a pitbull wearing lipstick but that's the only connection. To quibble about the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" is to put conservatives in the same category as illiterate PC liberals worried about the word "niggardly."
Driving home last night, I caught a few minutes of a right-wing talk radio show (one that had surely never aired a sexist remark about Hillary Clinton) and heard the spin that, well, Obama must have been making a sexist comment because presidential candidates don't talk like this. Take it, Dick Cheney.
John Kerry is trying every which way to cover up his record of weakness on national defense. But he can't do it. It won't work. As we like to say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on that pig, but at the end of the day, it's still a pig.
He dishes corn pone with a master's touch. "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig"; "that dog don't hunt"; Congressional efforts to give amnesty to illegal immigrants are "like selling a horse twice."
That was provided as an example of Thompson's "homey" touch, which was probably what Obama, brow-beaten for being unrelatable, was going for. So, Tom Tancredo?
I am disappointed but not surprised that the president has once again chosen to trot out this same old pig, albeit one with a slightly new shade of lipstick.
Finally, that crusader for gender equality, John McCain.
When asked about Mrs. Clinton his speech, he said her proposal was "eerily" similar to the plan she came up with in 1993, when she headed a health care reorganization effort during her husband's administration. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig," he said, "but it's still a pig."
We've got 56 days until the election. How many of them can McCain spend hiding behind Palin's skirt?
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey falls for a video press release from the McCain campaign (it's not an "ad" if it's 37 seconds long and doesn't contain an endorsement from the candidate) and claims that Obama gave Clinton the finger once… based on a video in which he scratches his face with his middle finger partially extended.