At 7:00 A.M this morning Victor Davis Hanson made a perspicacious prediction:
Expect Obama/Biden to get a little desperate and resort to more and more negative campaigning….
In this cycle of the see-saw race, expect Obama to take a risk and go really negative as he falls into a gripey, cranky mode.
Boy was he right. The Dems acted as though they were in a race to prove him right.
First, as reported by CBS, here’s Joe Biden in Columbia, Missouri, this morning:
I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there’s joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?
CBS reporter Ryan Corsaro asked, rhetorically I’m sure:
Was Joe Biden referring to Sarah Palin, a mother of a child with Down syndrome, when he made this comment?
CBS reports; you decide.
Obama, not to be outdone in the negative department, joined the race to the bottom in Lebanon, Virginia. Reports Politico:
Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.
“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”
As Politico’s Ben Smith observed, unnecessarily,
The crowd apparently took the “lipstick” line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: “lipstick.”
Obama can’t be so dumb as not to have known how his “lipstick” reference would be received.
UPDATE
For much more on this slime/gaffe, including the reference to McCain as an “old fish,” which I didn’t quote above because I missed the connection, see InstaPundit’s discussion and links here.
UPDATE II
Since I am one of the guilty ones Victor Davis Hanson mentions here, I will print his persuasive take on Obama’s fishy pig-latin:
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.
Obama is getting more shrill. He needs to concentrate on how to go down with dignity, because he is not going to win.
Obama is from the noam chomsky school of thinking. a white person with his viewpoints could not have gone this far. I feel bad, I really do, seeing him retract so many things he said in the past as it dawns on him that other people don’t think like that. In a fundamental way, people like that don’t get what makes people tick. The NYT had a front page article about swaziland and how poor it is, malnuitrition and aids, and how rich the king and his wifes are and how the king just scoops up women from the street if he likes how they look, and guess what, the people love their king. They are not resentful. The women don’t mind being swooped up. Now if the people of swaziland feel like that, how can liberals expect americans not to love america, their own country, their religion, their history. People don’t think the way that liberals think they do
I don’t know. I’m inclined to give Biden the benefit of the doubt on this. I mean, surely even he doesn’t think that embryonic stem cell research is going to supply a “cure” for trisomy-21.
Usually, when John launches into another “straight off the RNC Talking Points Daily Email” type attacks on a Democrat, I would cut and paste various examples why I think he’s wrong.
I don’t have to do that here, but I source my work.
My simple questions to the readers are these…
1. Was Barack Obama the very FIRST person to EVER use the phrase “lipstick on a pig” on Tuesday, September 9, 2008?
Answer: No. There are historical references going back decades.
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0408a&L=ads-l&P=14910
Including John McCain discussing Hillary Clinton’s healthcare policy during THIS campaign:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR8IhMMhe8w
2. Did Barack Obama even MENTION the Governor of Alaska in the statement where the phrase was used?
Answer: No.
This is simply more RNC Nonsense that McCain the Magician is trotting out to distract the American People.
The Unemployment rate hits a 5 year high at 6.1%. The GOP says:
“Let’s talk about pigs and lipstick”
The Federal Budget Deficit will balloon this January to an unheard of $500 Billion. The GOP says:
“Let’s talk about pigs and lipstick”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced today the the US was “running out of time” in Afghanistan, and we needed “a new more comprehensive strategy”…in other words, the war’s not going well. The GOP says:
“Let’s talk about pigs and lipstick”
Housing crisies, Credit crunchs, financial house bailouts, auto industry collapsing, soaring health care and tuition costs, giant Russian Cruisers doing Naval Exercises in the Carribean for the first time since the Cold War. The GOP says:
“Let’s talk about pigs and lipstick”
Is this all there is, John?
Is that what this is all about?
–Cobra