Political Animals

Oh come on now! You really can't take offense for being called on something you actually have done! (Well, you can, but it then becomes transparent bluster!) There was a movie (or perhaps it was a play) that I saw long enough ago that I cannot remember what it was or where I saw it. In this work, there was a line; this line comes up after the speaker has just made a generic disparaging comment and the other character as taken offense at it. The line went: "Why is it I show you a suit 'off-the-rack' and you assume it was custom tailored for you?"

The point being that the speaker had made a comment about the general situation and the person to whom they had been speaking took it as an accusation. It would be as if I were to be taking with my mates about how the crime rate had risen in recent years and one of them got offended and said that they had not stolen the car that went missing from the parking lot the week before. I had never said they had.

Or it would be like, say, one of the campaigns using a common idiom that has been in use for a long time, and the other campaign took it as a personal slur on their vice-presidential pick. I mean really, how can McCain (with all his experience - and I use that word without prejudice) never have heard the expression?

It is a common idiom. To put lipstick on a pig is to attempt to dress-up something and pass it off as something else - usually in the hopes that nobody notices. But let's assume, for a moment, that he didn't know the expression; why then did he use it in October 2007 when he referred to the Democratic Health Care plan as being a revival of Hillary Clinton's 1993 Health Care initiative by saying:

"I think they put some lipstick on a pig," he said, "but it's still a pig."

Please, tell me that this was not a personal attack on Ms. Clinton! But perhaps he was unfamiliar with the work of his former press secretary, Victoria Clarke, who is the author of a 2006 Book called... Uh... Something like:

"Lipstick On A Pig: Winning In The No-Spin Era By Someone Who Knows The Game"

Yeah, that must be it! He must have never made the connection between this common phrase that is being used all over the place and the phrase that he himself and those around him have bandied about. Perhaps he has reached senility and has forgotten this common expression. Perhaps he has forgotten using it himself. Perhaps in his dotage, he has entered that time in his life when everything is new and interesting again.

Come off it Mr. McCain, you know that Mr. Obama's comment last night:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig." ... "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called 'change,'" Obama went on, "it's still gonna stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing! It's time to bring about real change to Washington. And that's the choice you've got in this election."

was no personal affront on your running mate! You can call yourself a maverick all you want that don't make it true. Your, yourself, are proud of voting with the president in excess of 90% of the time. (Some maverick!) Your running mate claims she stopped "the bridge to nowhere" but she ran for governor on a platform that included support for the project. She claims to have put the Governor's jet on eBay and you claim that she sold it on eBay at a profit. The truth is that it was posted there but didn't sell. It was finally sold by an airplane broker at a loss to the state. Check your facts!

You continue your party's practice of lying repeatedly in the hopes that it will be taken as truth. Your entire campaign is lipstick on a pig. You have no right to take offense at the use of the phrase!

I heard this story on all three networks and one cable channel last night. All of them (with the exception of CBS) seemed to imply that Mr. McCain had some right to feel he had been called a fish and that his running mate had been called a pig. What a joke! (But then, what do you expect from the Liberal media, eh?)

Oh, and just in case the McCain campaign should happen to read this entry, that last line was what is called "Sarcasm" and it is not support for your assertion that you (the right) are ill-treated by the media... The opposite tends to be the actual truth. I say this as you seem to have a problem spotting these little details.

Wherever you are today (even if you are working for one of the campaigns), I hope you will have a day that is lovely and free of things from which you take offense!

Don Bergquist - September 10, 2008 - Lakewood, Colorado, USA