Lipstick on a Pig

Here it comes, my first possibly anti-Obama post:

Tuesday, Barack Obama, in comments in Virginia, compared McCain-Palin's attempts to label themselves as change-agents to putting lipstick on a pig. "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," Obama said. While it's true that Obama has used this particular phrase, and McCain used it in reference to Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan, I think it fairly likely that Obama did mean it as an underhanded jab at Palin. I'm not in the man's head, but it does seem odd to use lipstick imagery in such a way after Palin so prominently used it.

Rather prominent political bloggers, who claim that Obama was not referring to Palin, have missed this important distinction. The one most memorable line from Palin's convention speech (which sucked, by the way, but I suppose I wasn't exactly the target audience) involved her beauty-queen lips. This makes any subsequent mention of lipstick far more loaded than in the past. Of course, Obama says thousands of words a day in public, and maybe he just slipped. I don't know. It certainly seemed like a bad time to draw attention away from all the other potentially damaging issues swirling around Palin, whether it was intentional or a slip.

While we're on the subject, what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney? Lipstick.