Lipstick on a pig, and other ephemera.

Egads, silly season is the right word for it. One again, John McCain is at odds with the nature of colloquial speech. First it was the issue of his "lost bearings," and now it's the issue over whether he has a pig...that's right, a barnyard animal, for his running mate.

Let's examine how it got this far. McCain chose Sarah Palin for his running mate, who described herself in her acceptance speech to the RNC as a pitbull with lipstick. In a speech this week, Barack Obama described McCain's new-found cry of "change" to be an instance where lipstick was slapped on a pig--but the pig was still a pig.




He was obviously calling out McCain's claims of being a "change" candidate, which are silly and misleading. He was not likening Palin to a pig, any more than McCain likened Hillary Clinton to a pig when he called her health care plan "lipstick on a pig."



It's a common enough saying that nothing needs to be implied beyond the sentiment--it is dressing up something to appear as it is not--when it is what it is.

McCain is still Bush. His policies aren't about change. Palin, for what it's worth, seems to be Bush, too. She won't bring change. Neither of them are pigs, although given the prediliction for pork, if Palin were a pig, she would be a cannibal.

Which brings the focus back on her, doesn't it? What other phrases might offend?

Because the McCampaign did try to pass her off as a reformer, when her "Bridge to Nowhere"



story and her "sold Governor's jet on e-Bay" story




were both specious: Was she not a "pig in a poke?" If she sided against her party sometimes, was she not "independent as a hog on ice?"

The fake outrage on the right is stupid. Words are just words. What the McCampaign is whinging about is their lies being dismantled, not their reputations being slighted. No one is calling Palin, or even McCain, a pig.

They are being called frauds, because they are frauds. They lie. And lie. And lie.