Charade you are: McCain, the media, and pigs with lipstick

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Greenwald: "We're fighting multiple wars; our oldest and most established financial institutions are on the verge of collapse; we've fundamentally transformed and then dismantled our constitutional framework over the last eight years, etc. etc. But the Right and their media partners are striving to ensure that our election this year is going to be dominated and determined by whether John Kerry looks stupid in wind-surfing tights Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a 'pig' when he invoked a meaningless cliché." (Read the whole thing.)

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Obama today: "They seize on innocent remarks, try to throw them out of context, throw up an outrageous ad because they know that it's catnip for the news media. I don't care what they say about me but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift boat politics. Enough is enough."

A fine response, but, of course, enough is never enough for the Republicans and their media mouthpieces. And this is no exception.

The media are obsessed with such matters, after all, eagerly lapping up what the McCain campaign and the Republican Smear Machine are feeding them (and playing it all up), while McCain and his surrogates are, in typical right-wing fashion, claiming victimhood and already using the incident -- or, rather, their willful distortion of the incident -- to score political points. (Yes, there's already an ad.)

It hardly matters, within this dynamic, that Obama did not call Palin a pig. (See Memeorandum for much more reaction.) Obama has used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" before, and so has McCain. In fact, Meghan McCain says that her father has used "the term" before (though she also stupidly claims she has "no idea" if Obama was directing it at Palin or not, which just goes to show that, in her case, the apple is right next to the tree.)

Then again, McCain has also been known to use the 'c' word and Palin herself, it has been reported, has been known to hurl the slurs.

Apparently, what is offensive is in the eye of the (Republican) beholder.

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Here's the video of Obama's remarks today: