Of Pigs and Lipstick

From the time the Maverick conjured up a non-entity from nowhere to spruce up his increasingly decrepit campaign, goody goody liberals and loathsome (Rush) Limbaughites have found their positions reversed. The erstwhile Kinder, Küche, Kirche crowd now thinks it’s just fine that Sarah Palin be VP (once she finds out what VPs do), and that it doesn’t matter that her duties in that office are bound take time away from the husband she must love, honor and obey, and the five children that have popped out of her – one with Downs Syndrome and another with a bun in the oven, thanks to the wonders of abstinence only sex education. Meanwhile, some of those liberal ladies who think the sun rises and sets with Hillary are not so sure. That’s not all: Limbaugh and his ilk used to rant and rave about “political correctness,” and to deride the sensitivities of self-declared “victims.” Now they can’t do enough to assure that no one, absolutely no one, says anything that anyone could construe as a slight to their girl Sarah. But since she’s so eminently slight-worthy, there are liberal ladies, some of them with media access, who can’t resist.

Don’t forget either that, for the GOP, “celebrity” and “rock star” used to be terms of derision. They no longer are, now that a certain Northern Light has descended upon us. [Since their Saint Paul infomercial, “community organizer” has become the new, even more improbable, term of derision.]

Thus it is that, as this increasingly surreal world turns, we awoke this morning to find Maverick McCain’s handlers taking Barack Obama to task for saying, in reference to McCain’s blather about “reform,” that if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. No matter that, as even NPR pointed out, he’d used the expression before anyone in the lower forty-eight (or exotic, outlying Hawaii) had even heard of Wasilla’s former Miss Congeniality or, for that matter, of Wasilla itself. No matter that John McCain had used the same well-worn expression in connection with one or another proposal of Hillary Clinton’s. It’s all a veiled slight to Sarah, you see, and it must not go unavenged!

What’s this about? What it’s about is that one of the zingers written for McCain’s rock star to read during her acceptance speech in Saint Paul has legs. It’s the “joke” about hockey moms and pit bulls with lipstick. Give me a break! But, since it was McCain or his handlers who raised the issue, shouldn’t Obama take time out from his continuing “surge” to the right to point out that this well-delivered quip is a recycled version of an old sexist joke about women with PMS, not to mention an undeserved slight on a worthy breed of dog? Or is he too eager for the media to focus on yet another instance of GOP absurdity, on a day when his own POP, the Party of Pusillanimity (or Pelosiism – there’s no difference!) is about to cave in on off-shore drilling?

It would be increasingly difficult for anyone who pays the least attention to what Obama and his fellow Clintonites are up to to remain on board but for the fact that the other side keeps demonstrating conclusively that they are much greater evils. Lets hope that Obama and Company don’t remain too much the gentlemen and ladies to point this out. In the election ahead, nice guys and gals won’t automatically finish last – not when there are Bushes and Cheyneys and McCains and now Palins handing them victory on a platter. But neocons and Christian Taliban can only do so much. If Obama doesn’t start fighting back with a nastiness equal to theirs, he could well turn out to be the third Dukakis (after Kerry and Gore) of the twenty-first century.