Bullshit. Look at the video. Look how pleased with himself he is. He’s grinning like Buckwheat laughing at Spanky when he throws a watermelon at Porky . Oh wait, nothing racial meant there, just saying. Liberal apologists are claiming it’s an old expression and claiming McCain has used it:
UPDATE: Tom Bevan has it exactly right: I agree with this to the letter.
This sanctimonious asshole at Bosque Boys has it exactly wrong.
yeah, but since the “lipstick and hockey Moms” reference, the crowd certainly gets it. If McCain said Obama hadn’t had an original policy “in a coon’s age” or spoke frankly by “calling a spade a spade”, hoo boy, you don’t think the Daily Kos Media wouldn’t split a gut?
Obama milks it for comic timing. He laughs along with the crowd. He constructs the “gag” around McCain and Palin, then launches the metaphors. It’s obvious, and it’s obvious he did it with malice aforethought, so he could plausibly deny it later. But I don’t think he thought it through.
I think Obama has a serious problem with women. It probably has to do with his father abandoning him. Even when it damaged him politically, he couldn’t resist making sexist comments about Hillary, or doing juvenile things like flipping her off.
He has shown that Palin has seriously gotten under his skin. There is no way the top of the ticket should be engaging the VP nominee. It’s nearly unprecedented. And Obama has been pretty resistant to ill-considered idiocy like this, other than in response to women, first Hillary and now Palin.
Jennifer Rubin:
The entire exchange is of course deeply offensive and disrespectful, treating his opponent’s running mate as a sexualized object and a mere mother, to put it bluntly. I can’t imagine there is any Democratic woman — forget the Republicans and Independents — who isn’t embarrassed. Obama appears to be crumbling under pressure, reduced to swinging away at the person who has supplanted him as the political star of the Election.
Exactly. You ever hear anyone “compliment” a male politician on how many KIDS HE HAS??? “That Robert Kennedy, I respect him so much! 10 kids! I don’t know how he does it!”
Obama is insulting Palin with the “oh, what an impressive little woman” ploy, after calling her a pig.
It’s disgusting, but it will make his defeat all that much more satisfying. The guy has a serious problem with women, and even more-so when he feels they diss him. He is so psychologically messed up that he can’t help himself, even when it might damage him politically. Flipping off Hillary was not a smart move, however satisfying it may have been to him personally. Same with this.
I guess the logical extension of this will be the candidates just snidely making pricknosed attacks on each other and all civility completely discarded. McCain should immediately question Obama’s upbringing and wonder if the black Muslim culture taught his this kind of behavior, or was it his bigoted white Grandmother, who was ashamed of her genetically inferior grandchild and so instilled into him ape-like tendencies to demean and disrespect women, which is a trait peculiar to black culture as well.
How would those apples fly? Is that the kind of discourse we want? Obama claimed to wish to elevate political discourse, and he has pretty much succeeded in coarsening it all year. This is a disgusting mother-fucker, but it will make his defeat all the more satisfying.
This will certainly not win him a bigger share of the women’s vote. It’s hard to believe he would sacrifice winning the presidency to get a dig in, but his intelligence has long been over-estimated, as well as his political savvy.
via Instapundit
DID OBAMA MEAN TO CALL SARAH PALIN A PIG? It’s probably just a slip, but . . . “The crowd apparently took the ‘lipstick’ line as a reference to Palin.”
Reader David Schlosser emails: “This will endear him to all those disaffected Hillary voters.” And former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift is calling on Obama to apologize.
All I can say is, some pig.
UPDATE: “Lipstick on a trainwreck.”
Plus, Tom Spaulding: “This is a major gaffe from Obama.”
But reader Mark Martin emails: “This was just plain stupid on Senator Obama’s part. It must be due to Karl Rove mind rays or something.”
MORE: A reader emails: “Surely a man smart enough to be elected president should have foreseen how these remarks would be taken. Don’t Harvard law grads know the impact of words?” Everybody stumbles now and then. I say, don’t make any more of it than if McCain had said something similar.
On the other hand, reader Alin Corle emails: “I think if you look at the entire quote, you realize that Obama was referring to Palin in the ‘pig’ comment. In the next phrase, as reported by Politico.com, Obama referred to ‘old fish’ wrapped in a paper of change that still stinks, a clear personal attack on McCain. I think both comments taken together are quite outrageous.”
Stay tuned.
MORE STILL: Reader Meryl Jefferson emails: “Palin is, quite obviously, getting inside Obama’s head. This was beyond stupid! This will be played by McCain quite easily: Sarah will continue to bait him and he just goes for it. Remember the Wyle E. Coyote/Roadrunner meme that Ann Althouse set up when Palin was first rolled out? Well, she was right!”
Meanwhile, David Winslow invokes Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond:
Seriously, nobody with half a brain thinks Obama was referring to Palin.
But, nobody with half a brain thinks a basic compliment at your friend’s 100th birthday party belies veiled racism.
Just saying it would be nice to have these things treated consistently for a change. Consistently sane.
Hmm. As a Lott critic, I’m not sure how I should take that, but okay. And reader Tim Ryan reads the whole Obama statement and says: “He’s a skilled orator, and he brings it all back around to McCain and Palin. It is absolutely clear that he is tying Palin to the Pig and McCain to the Old Fish. He didn’t construct this accidentally or innocently. Unless you think that he isn’t skilled or smart, and we all know that he is. He tries to create some plausible deniability, but there are only two explanations – he is either a mean-spirited p***, or he’s an idiot. And the latter simply isn’t true.”
Meanwhile, Barry Dauphin writes: “Obama was inelegant in his comment. He was referring to Palin. Although it was not a good comment, getting hysterical about it is not smart. Put it this way, Obama’s comment was hardly post partisan. He’s usually a better speaker than this. He and his campaign must be quite rattled. They are playing to their base instead of going after independents. Why are they doing that, unless they are worried about their base? Do they have internal polling showing things to be worse for them than the MSM is reporting?”
Yeah, other people are wondering that, too.
via Powerline:
Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen report that Democratic Congressman Russ Carnahan introduced Joe Biden at a campaign event today. Referring to Sarah Palin’s record, Carnahan commented: “There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick.”
Plying the same theme with respect to McCain-Palin campaign rhetoric in Lebanon, Virginia, Barack Obama asserted: “You can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.” Given the tittering, shouts and raucous applause from Obama’s audience, even AP reporter Nedra Pickler found Obama’s audience drawing the connection between Obama’s comment and Sarah Palin’s convention joke.
Vandehei and Allen, by contrast, cover for Obama. They assert that “he was clearly talking about the McCain-Palin reform rhetoric.” Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental? Maybe, but the evidence of Carnahan’s remarks referring to Palin strongly suggests otherwise. And if Obama didn’t understand the ugly reference to Palin, he appears to be the only guy in Lebanon who didn’t.
Via Hugh Hewitt.