McSlime and Palin: Unfit for Office
Caveat: I have not actually pored over nor even encountered the words Obama said that involved lipstick. So I am basically working off of what amounts to hearsay and such here. My understanding is that Obama was addressing McCain's economic "program," to the laughable extent he has even sketched such a program. He utilized the familiar cliche "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig." As John McBush has done in the same words several times in the past in dismissing programs of his opponents. No doubt the "lipstick" in question still reeked of pit-bull. Good on you Barack. Good indeed.
But somehow the McShamers have the need to pile on even more of the dishonest, down-and-dirty drivel that they seem to be determined will be their "hallmark." I.e., sleaziest campaign ever. They want us to waste a couple days debating whether he was calling Palin a pig! While she wasn't even under discussion when he used the cliche, I am stipulating for the record that any such implication by them was totally brought on by her invocation of pitbull and lipstick.
I'll kick this off with full content of great post by Joan Walsh at Salon:
Glenn Greenwald did the best job possible running down this ridiculous faux-controversy about Barack Obama using the term "lipstick on a pig," but I can't leave it alone. I'm talking about it on MSNBC's "Hardball" today.
Maybe most outrageous, McCain himself has used the term several times, most recently talking about Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said last year. Was he being sexist? Where was the condemnation back then?
Second, Obama wasn't even talking about Palin when he made the remark; he was talking about McCain's empty economic program. Which sure enough looks like lipstick on a pig, to me.
But the most despicable thing about this campaign of faux-outrage is the GOP's sad double standard about Sarah Palin's treatment. Let me first say: One thing I like about Sarah Palin is her toughness. As I've already written, she can throw a punch, and she can take a punch. She glories in the "pit bull" role the vice-presidential nominee often plays. And yet the cynical McCain campaign is trying to erect a defense shield around her using the tackiest kind of victim feminism. Palin herself should tell her cowardly handlers to knock it off; she's woman enough to stand up for herself. (Oh, except then she might have to talk to the press, and we know she's not quite woman enough for that, at least not yet.)
Like Glenn, I think Obama made a real start at self-defense today, finally, proclaiming "spare me the false outrage" and "enough is enough" with Rovian attacks. I hope he keeps fighting back. McCain and Palin know their campaign is dead in the water if the race is on the issues, so they're trying to gin up phony controversies and keep Obama on his heels. I'm glad to see him standing up for himself today, and I look forward to more of it.
There has been a steady drip-drip-drip recently of former Bush/McSame supporters who have finally disinterred their HS geometry cheat-sheets enough to draw something like a trajectory between the points on the chart they enthusiastically helped these thugs put up. Presumably for a variety of reasons, duplicitous and self-serving in varying degrees, these seeming former rodents want to be reunited with Homo maniacal. Andrew Sullivan seems an improbable, but here he is:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
-clip-
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
I believe I came upon that through the good devices of Josh Marshall of the magnificent TPM braintrust. As always, Josh was both earlier to and more savvy about this:
One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as.
But over the last ... maybe six weeks, in various conversations with these folks, the change is palpable. Whether it will make any difference in the tone of coverage in the dominant media I do not know. But it is sinking in.
All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let's face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we've become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House. And today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn't willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There's clearly no level of sleaze this guy won't stoop to to win this election.
And let's be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one's control -- not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.
Somewhat astonishingly, even the Washington Post editorial page, routinely sycophantic for the present administration, McBush, and in general totally challenged when confronted with this rovian thuggery, has this:
It's hard to think of a presidential campaign with a wider chasm between the seriousness of the issues confronting the country and the triviality, so far anyway, of the political discourse. On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Sen. John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Sen. Barack Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.
Mr. Obama's supposedly offending remark was not only not offensive -- it also was not directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. "The other side, suddenly, they're saying 'we're for change too,' " Mr. Obama said. "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." With a woman on the ticket, apparently all references to cosmetics -- or pork of the non-bridge variety, for that matter -- are forbidden. "Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology," sniffed former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift. "Calling a very prominent female governor of one of our states a pig is not exactly what we want to see." No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.
The kindergarten sex ad, exhuming an argument that Republican Alan Keyes used against Mr. Obama in his 2004 Senate race, was equally ridiculous. "Obama's one accomplishment?" the narrator asks. "Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' -- to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama: wrong on education. Wrong for your family." As a state senator, Mr. Obama voted for -- though he did not sponsor -- a measure that set out standards for non-mandatory sex and health education. It required that instruction be "age and developmentally appropriate" and allowed parents to have their children opt out. To call this an accomplishment seems a departure for a campaign that was insisting just last week that Mr. Obama had no legislation to his credit, conveniently ignoring his significant work on a lobbying reform bill. Mr. Obama's support for the Illinois measure seems both reasonable and relatively unimportant.
John McCain is a serious man who promised to wage a serious campaign. Win or lose, will he be able to look back on this one with pride? Right now, it's hard to see how.
But somehow the McShamers have the need to pile on even more of the dishonest, down-and-dirty drivel that they seem to be determined will be their "hallmark." I.e., sleaziest campaign ever. They want us to waste a couple days debating whether he was calling Palin a pig! While she wasn't even under discussion when he used the cliche, I am stipulating for the record that any such implication by them was totally brought on by her invocation of pitbull and lipstick.
I'll kick this off with full content of great post by Joan Walsh at Salon:
Glenn Greenwald did the best job possible running down this ridiculous faux-controversy about Barack Obama using the term "lipstick on a pig," but I can't leave it alone. I'm talking about it on MSNBC's "Hardball" today.
Maybe most outrageous, McCain himself has used the term several times, most recently talking about Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said last year. Was he being sexist? Where was the condemnation back then?
Second, Obama wasn't even talking about Palin when he made the remark; he was talking about McCain's empty economic program. Which sure enough looks like lipstick on a pig, to me.
But the most despicable thing about this campaign of faux-outrage is the GOP's sad double standard about Sarah Palin's treatment. Let me first say: One thing I like about Sarah Palin is her toughness. As I've already written, she can throw a punch, and she can take a punch. She glories in the "pit bull" role the vice-presidential nominee often plays. And yet the cynical McCain campaign is trying to erect a defense shield around her using the tackiest kind of victim feminism. Palin herself should tell her cowardly handlers to knock it off; she's woman enough to stand up for herself. (Oh, except then she might have to talk to the press, and we know she's not quite woman enough for that, at least not yet.)
Like Glenn, I think Obama made a real start at self-defense today, finally, proclaiming "spare me the false outrage" and "enough is enough" with Rovian attacks. I hope he keeps fighting back. McCain and Palin know their campaign is dead in the water if the race is on the issues, so they're trying to gin up phony controversies and keep Obama on his heels. I'm glad to see him standing up for himself today, and I look forward to more of it.
There has been a steady drip-drip-drip recently of former Bush/McSame supporters who have finally disinterred their HS geometry cheat-sheets enough to draw something like a trajectory between the points on the chart they enthusiastically helped these thugs put up. Presumably for a variety of reasons, duplicitous and self-serving in varying degrees, these seeming former rodents want to be reunited with Homo maniacal. Andrew Sullivan seems an improbable, but here he is:
For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?
So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.
And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.
-clip-
Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.
McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.
I believe I came upon that through the good devices of Josh Marshall of the magnificent TPM braintrust. As always, Josh was both earlier to and more savvy about this:
One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as.
But over the last ... maybe six weeks, in various conversations with these folks, the change is palpable. Whether it will make any difference in the tone of coverage in the dominant media I do not know. But it is sinking in.
All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let's face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we've become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House. And today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn't willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There's clearly no level of sleaze this guy won't stoop to to win this election.
And let's be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one's control -- not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.
Somewhat astonishingly, even the Washington Post editorial page, routinely sycophantic for the present administration, McBush, and in general totally challenged when confronted with this rovian thuggery, has this:
It's hard to think of a presidential campaign with a wider chasm between the seriousness of the issues confronting the country and the triviality, so far anyway, of the political discourse. On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Sen. John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Sen. Barack Obama for using the phrase "lipstick on a pig" and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.
Mr. Obama's supposedly offending remark was not only not offensive -- it also was not directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. "The other side, suddenly, they're saying 'we're for change too,' " Mr. Obama said. "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." With a woman on the ticket, apparently all references to cosmetics -- or pork of the non-bridge variety, for that matter -- are forbidden. "Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology," sniffed former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift. "Calling a very prominent female governor of one of our states a pig is not exactly what we want to see." No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.
The kindergarten sex ad, exhuming an argument that Republican Alan Keyes used against Mr. Obama in his 2004 Senate race, was equally ridiculous. "Obama's one accomplishment?" the narrator asks. "Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' -- to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama: wrong on education. Wrong for your family." As a state senator, Mr. Obama voted for -- though he did not sponsor -- a measure that set out standards for non-mandatory sex and health education. It required that instruction be "age and developmentally appropriate" and allowed parents to have their children opt out. To call this an accomplishment seems a departure for a campaign that was insisting just last week that Mr. Obama had no legislation to his credit, conveniently ignoring his significant work on a lobbying reform bill. Mr. Obama's support for the Illinois measure seems both reasonable and relatively unimportant.
John McCain is a serious man who promised to wage a serious campaign. Win or lose, will he be able to look back on this one with pride? Right now, it's hard to see how.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:41 PM
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