McCain takes offense at the same lipstick-on-a-pig remark he used himself
20 comments September 9th, 2008
We geezers sometimes have memory lapses, and John McCain just had a doozy.
The McCain campaign is complaining that Barack Obama slurred Sarah Palin with these comments made today on the campaign trail:
“John McCain says he’s about change, too – except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. 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 going to stink after eight years.”
Clearly, Obama was talking about the Bush administration’s policies, not Palin. But the McCain people apparently think they can embarrass Obama by making a fuss over this thing.
Aha, but McCain seems not to remember certain remarks he made last year, reported by the Chicago Tribune as follows:
“McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, he said it was ‘eerily reminiscent’ of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.
“‘I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,’ he said of her proposal.”
Of course, this context won’t stop the right-wing blogosphere from waxing apoplectic over Obama’s alleged rudeness and sexism.
UPDATE (Wednesday a.m.): Blowback against the McCain camp’s phony umbrage HERE and HERE and HERE.
UPDATE II: I’ve found a second instance in which McCain referred to “lipstick on a big” while mentioning Hillary Clinton. The occasion cited above in the Tribune story occurred on Oct. 11, 2007, in Des Moines, Iowa. About two weeks earlier, on Sept. 29, he used the same line at a gathering in Rye, N.H., as we see HERE.
