Oddly, on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary of that day only seven years ago when America suffered the deadliest foreign attacks in history, the most important topic on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s lips was lipstick.
“You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig,” the Illinois senator said on Tuesday night, sending his small audience of supporters into a frenzy of cheers.
Obama’s excuse-makers flooded the media on Wednesday, frantically trying to deflect America’s reaction to his words, arguing: “Do you really think Senator Obama was trying to call [Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Governor] Sarah Palin a pig?”
Yes, Mr. Obama was doing precisely this, and he deserves the backlash he is receiving from women and men across the political spectrum.
Obama’s statement was a stupid, almost suicidal political act. At best it showed that his silver tongue moves faster than his brain. At worst it makes us wonder if he has the wisdom, judgment, and maturity to be president.
Obama is underslept and exhausted from campaigning. He lacks the vigor and 3 a.m. clear-headedness of Republican GOP standard-bearer Sen. John McCain.
Obama in recent weeks has taken a pounding from hundreds of advisers who shove him back into each boxing round with orders to hit harder, act tougher, and shift from his emotionally cool Harvard doublespeak to the punchy blunt vernacular of working people.
Democrats employ “framers,” linguistic experts adept at manipulating words and images to present the most favorable image of liberals and most negative image of conservatives.
It’s easy to guess what these deceptive verbal hucksters have been telling Obama: Palin has been destroying you with a compelling word, “lipstick.” One of her slogans is, “Read My Lipstick.” Her favorite joke is that the only difference between a pit bull and a “hockey mom” is lipstick.
Lipstick has become a “brand name” for Palin’s campaign, strengthening her appeal to men and her identification with women, these word-twisting “framers” must have told Obama, and to defeat Palin we need to poison this word to destroy her ability to use it.
The technique of Obama’s semantic sophists is to dirty up words, to give them new negative associations that pop up in a listener’s mind whenever the word is used.
These manipulators probably Googled “lipstick” for negative uses and found this old joke about lipstick on a pig. They almost certainly primed and scripted Obama so he could use the joke in some “other” context that liberal media allies could tag to Palin.
Embarrassed by Obama’s crude, awkward, and incompetent use of this weapon, Democrat apologists were desperate on Wednesday.
One silly liberal attempt to neutralize the issue was a quickly assembled newsreel of assorted Republicans using the lipstick-on-a-pig joke months or years ago. But all these examples predate “lipstick” becoming Palin’s political trademark.
Obama, whose allies used sexist smears against his primaries rival Sen. Hillary Clinton, attached the word lipstick to pigs after it had become Gov. Palin’s political trademark.
When you smear people’s trademarks, you smear them. Obama obviously did this deliberately — but clumsily.
Obama doubtless sees himself as the victim of a similar GOP attack on his past as a “community organizer.” Obama’s job, noted Palin in her Republican Convention speech, was a little like her former job as mayor but without "actual responsibility.”
Obama’s “community organizer” job on Chicago’s South Side consisted mostly of dispensing socialist propaganda and fomenting racial polarization and class warfare to benefit the city’s Democratic political machine.
Typical of loony leftists defending Obama was Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen, who as a white Jewish candidate in a majority African-American Memphis district, fought an ugly campaign to eke out re-nomination.
“Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus,” Rep. Cohen proclaimed. “Pontius Pilate was a governor.”
Sarah Palin is governor of Alaska, and the only candidate on either major party’s ticket with executive experience governing a city and a state.
Although politically foolish, Obama has tried to drag the Republican vice presidential candidate into mud-wrestling with him. In most presidential races the VP candidates wield the hatchets so those at the top of each ticket can have clean hands, but in this odd year Obama has debased himself to grapple with the Republican VP choice.
One apparent reason for Obama’s demeaning behavior is that Palin is no ordinary rival running-mate. She is the engine pulling the McCain-Palin ticket, the source of much of its energy, vitality, and skyrocketing polls that are leaving Obama behind in the dust.
A second reason for Obama’s attacks on Palin is that she has displaced him. Only months ago he was the fresh new kid on the block being cheered by adoring multitudes and given the lion’s share of media attention.
Palin is the public’s new darling. And this has turned Obama into yesterday’s star who after two years of campaigning has become overexposed, predictable, and now widely seen as just another Democratic promise-them-anything, politics-as-usual hack.
A third reason why Obama and his far-left allies have turned their guns on Palin is that she is hated and feared by the left far more than is McCain.
Palin is the left’s mortal enemy, as veteran pundit Morton Kondracke noted, because she threatens to undermine key constituency groups on which the Democratic Party depends for its survival — women, anti-abortion Roman Catholics, and blue collar workers. (Pro-abortion groups have already committed $30 million to “swift boat” her. Neo-Marxist feminists have gone berserk that Palin embodies an attractive right-wing, pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-capitalism, pro-American, anti-dependence-on-government feminism.)
If Palin becomes the first female vice president, a sizeable chunk of these groups could be lost to Democrats forever. She must be destroyed, fulminates the left, by any means, fair or foul.
Ironically, when Barack Obama began his presidential run, his lips often appeared slightly purple under bright television lights, something that I, as a former Los Angeles television reporter and commentator, noticed. Because this no longer happens, reporters should ask Barack Obama if he now uses lipstick.
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