John McCain: "Sarah Palin is a Pig!"

This is just bizarre. During a campaign stop in Virginia, Barack Obama questioned John McCain's claim to represent change, saying "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." In response, the McCain campaign has charged Obama with a sexist slur against McCain's running mate, Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, who got a laugh during her speech to the Republican National Convention with a joke about the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom being lipstick.

The charge is not only a non sequitir, it sounds all the more discordant coming from McCain, whose (until recently grudging) defenders in the right wing media have often charged Barack Obama with being too thin-skinned and eager to position himself as a victim. And, as Rick at Bent Corner wrote earlier today, "as far as fake outrage goes, this is pretty desperate."

Obama wasn't even talking about Palin when he used the "lipstick on a pig" line. After saying that, he also told the crowd, "You can wrap the same old fish in a newspaper called 'Change.' It's still gonna stink after eight years." Yeah, he was totally talking about Sarah Palin.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain himself have both criticized their opponents by accusing them of "putting lipstick on a pig." McCain employed the line last October in Iowa, in reference to Hillary Clinton's proposed plan for national health care.

The correlation between Obama's metaphorical pig and the Governor of Alaska was made by McCain's people. What does that tell you, that folks in the McCain/Palin camp heard Obama toss out a tired porcine cliché and immediately assumed he must be talking about their vice presidential nominee? Because it tells me that they think she's a pig. I agree, but I'm shocked to hear a campaign refer so derogatorily to someone on their own ticket.

Nevertheless, I applaud the honesty from the man who once proudly rode the Straight Talk Express. Sarah Palin is a pig.

And hey, Palin already likened herself to a pit bull. Would being called a pig be so bad after that? I'm normally a dog person, true, but how many children's faces get ripped off by pigs every year? Seriously, though - Barack Obama didn't call Sarah Palin a pig. He's got too much class to ever do that. I, however, am not running for any office, and am just not that classy of a guy when you get right down to it, so I will call her a pig all fucking day long.

Sarah Palin is a pig. I don't mean because she's physically unattractive, or a slob, or any of the other superficial reasons people get called pigs.

I think someone who inquires how to ban books - that old chestnut of totalitarianism - in her hometown is a pig. (Her response to the book-banning charge is to claim her conversation with the town librarian, which resulted in the termination of the librarian, was merely "rhetorical." Fine. Should we elect to the vice presidency someone who "rhetorically" asks around about how she might move Native Alaskans into internment camps, for instance?)

I think someone who refuses to provide health care and retirement benefits to same-sex partners of state employees until forced to by the state supreme court, and then pushes for an amendment to the state constitution to overrule the court decision, is a pig.

I think someone who promotes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while opposing federal protection of polar bears and beluga whales as endangered species is a pig.

I think someone who hired a lobbying firm to secure $27,000,000 in earmarked federal funds for her hometown, and as governor supported the $450,000,000 "Bridges to Nowhere" until they became unpopular, and then claims to be a reformer and an enemy of corruption, is a pig.

She's the same old pig that conservative ideologues have been trying to sneak onto a national ticket for decades - a proud enemy of free speech, an outspoken opponent of civil rights for gay Americans, a champion of the oil industry who displays open contempt for her own state's natural beauty, a hypocrite who promises fiscal responsibility, yet eagerly accepts and even actively courts government largesse when it serves her interests. Now she's the Republican nominee to be Vice President of the United States. All it took was a little lipstick.