Lipstick on a pig

If you haven't already heard about this idiotic and depressing campaign pseudo-scandal, you're lucky. I feel almost absurd mentioning it ... but this transparently cynical ploy by the McCain campaign does have a lot of people in a lather (including some who ought to be smart enough to feel embarrassed).

As Andrew Sullivan correctly nails it:

So it's come to this. The full context of Barack Obama's quote is as follows:

“John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s just calling the same thing something different.”

With a laugh, he added: “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.”

We are being asked to believe that he called Sarah Palin a pig. If the people making that accusation have half a brain they know it's not true. This is not a question of interpretation. It is a fact. So we now find out again that John McCain is prepared to tell an absolute lie - in public, verifiable, uncontestable.

He does not have the minimal public integrity to be president of the United States.

Game this all you want; distort it all you want; bamboozle the morons at cable news all you want; win however many news cycles you want.

This claim is absurd on its face, like the Palin nomination to begin with. Absurd. And you can now tell who on the right has even a scintilla of intellectual honesty. That's all this episode is about: another tail-spin in the death throes of the Republican party. [....]

Actually, that last point may be overly optimistic. This kind of stuff is certainly despicable and insulting to our intelligence--but it may work, at least in terms of winning the election.

Getting back to reality a moment, HERE here is John McCain in November 2007 describing Hillary Clinton's health-care plan:

It's [...] eerily reminiscent of what they tried back in 1993. I think they've put some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig.

Was McCain calling Hillary Clinton a pig? Give me a break!

Who's the real pig in all this? See HERE.

Yours for minimal political sanity,
Jeff Weintraub