The Pig, the Old Fish and the Pink Panther

When I first heard the Obama "Pig quote" I didn't believe it. I thought it was just a rumor. It was just too stupid to come out of the mouth of any intelligent candidate. But it was true. Don't forget that he not only insulted women with the lipstick line but he went after seniors with the Stinky Old Fish line. More disturbing than the insult part of today's incident, is the fact that Obama seems to be crumbling under the pressure.

Beginning with the selection of Governor Palin, Senator Obama seems to be really LOSING IT. He has lost his focus. Obama has become like Herbert Lom in the old Pink Panther movies, he played Clouseau's Boss who hated the Peter Sellers character so much that he kept trying to kill him. Lom's character keeps hurting himself in his attempts and eventually winds up insane. Obama keeps hurting himself trying to get at Palin.

If he can't handle the pressure of a campaign, how is he going to handle the pressure of running the United States?:

Was McCain the stinky old fish? [Victor Davis Hanson]

In all the furor over the Obama "pig" quote, commentators forgot to examine his entire attack:

"You can put lipstick on a pig. "It's still a pig."

"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink."

When read in the entire context you can see what he seems to mean with his dual animate male/female references and why he probably evoked two metaphors: most would think that Obama is talking about both on the ticket and his anger how each has expropriated his change motif.

So in that sense he appears both to insult the 72-year old McCain as the "old fish" that is still going to "stink", and to refer to Palin, who had famously evoked the metaphor of lipstick in a nationally televised address, as still the pig despite the lipstick.

The fact that he used two metaphors to attack the two, and used expressions referring both to age and Palin's recent use of "lipstick" don't seem to be accidents and that's why the cooing crowd got the old fish=McCain;lipsticked pig=Palin immediately.

I'll leave it to others to deconstruct the historical use of pig as a sexist term in the recent climate of generic attacks on Sarah Palin.

PS. The VP nominee was just announced and already Biden has called her "good looking" and now “a step back for women”; most know what he intended, but like most Bidenisms they come out wrongly and confirm a popular perception that he suffers from logorhhea and that there is a different standard of reference applied to Palin due to her sex.

Someone in the campaign has got to manage the ex tempore carelessness.