Stop the presses!!!
Barack Obama has been saying in his stump speeches that McCain and Palin can try to dress up their records to look like reformers, but they are still regular politicians, in the mold of George W. Bush. There’s a cute but offensively sexist (really??) saying for this assertion….how does it go….”You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” And Obama used it on the stump yesterday to illustrate his point.
All kinds of bloggers and even media types are crying foul- calling the joke a slur against women. And it’s not like anyone in the McCain campaign, least of all McCain himself, would ever use those words, especially to talk about a female politician who was running for the highest office in the land. Because that would be offensive and sexist, right?
Oops.
Enough. This sort of gratituitous whining is unabashed reverse sexism. It raises the barriers for women rather than lift them, and as a woman I couldn’t be more offended. It seems to me that Team McCain want Sarah Palin to be the subject of every discussion, preferably of insults they can decry, because otherwise their candidacy goes back to being, well, boring. So they trot out surrogates claiming that people are demeaning Sarah Palin as a woman! (I just heard an Oklahoma Congresswoman said that). Nonsense.
Obama and company are clearly just demeaning Palin as an underqualified politician, period. Sort of like how Karl Rove ripped on Tim Kaine when everyone thought he would be Obama’s veep pick. If you haven’t seen the clip from the Daily Show, it is a must watch. Bill O’Reilly kicks Jamie Lynn Spear’s MOTHER for bad parenting, then a couple months later, defends the honor of another mother of a pregnant teen. Hmmmm…..
