Hey, if it’s ok for Sarah Palin to call herself a pitbull in lipstick, why would it be so terrible for Obama (not that he actually did this) to call her a pig in lipstick? Don’t pigs have the same creaturely dignity as pit bulls? Don’t we believe in equality? Haven’t people seen Babe?
In his piece, Mulshine dispels these and other suffocating pieties surrounding St. Sarah:
GOP liberals play the sexism card for Palin
Posted by Paul Mulshine September 10, 2008 7:27PM
I was out jogging on the beach last night with my dog when we came upon a pit bull. It didn’t have lipstick on, so I knew it wasn’t going to be the next vice-president.
Can I say that?
Apparently so. Sarah Palin described herself as a pit bull with lipstick.
But when Barack Obama used the cliche “lipstick on a pig” in an unrelated context, the McCain-Palin campaign went into attack mode, accusing Obama of having called the woman who calls herself a pit bull in lipstick a pig in lipstick.
This is the silliest issue ever debated in national politics and it represents a new low for the Republican Party. McCain himself used the “lipstick on a pig” cliche, as did General Petraeus.
Yet it’s somehow sexist when Obama uses it?
The political pros who run the party want us to believe that Palin is a tough politician who will be able to stand up to Vladimir Putin and other foreign leaders if she becomes president. Yet they also want to portray her as some sort of fragile woman who can’t stand even the slightest insult from that big, bad old sexist Barack.
I never thought I’d see a Republican playing the sexism card. If your girl can’t stand up on her own two feet, boys, then nominate someone who can. And also let me ask this: Who’s going to watch her kids while she’s running around campaigning? She sure didn’t do much of a job of it while she was governor.
Are you going to call me a sexist for asking that question? Very well then, call me a sexist. That’s what you liberals do when a conservative argues that family should come first. I don’t think the mother of a five-month-old should be running for national office. She can’t possibly give her baby the attention he deserves.
She certainly wasn’t giving 17-year-old Bristol the attention she deserved when she let her run around in the long Alaskan night with that hockey thug. The prior low for the Republican Party, by the way, occurred last week when the baby daddy showed up at the Republican convention and got a warm greeting from the man the GOP has nominated for the top office in the land.
If you weren’t outraged by that, you’re not a conservative. It’s liberals who are supposed to celebrate out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy. I half-expected Palin to use Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” as her theme song. You know, the one that goes “I’ve made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby.” I never expected in my lifetime to see the Republicans glorifying teen pregnancy.
And then of course there’s the way the campaign is keeping her away from reporters. As a journalist with 33 years in the business this leads me to one conclusion: The campaign doesn’t trust her to answer simple questions, questions like “Were you for the bridge to nowhere before you were against it?”
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post excoriates the McCain campaign for hypocrisy:
“As for the sudden insistence that Palin is a delicate flower who must be shielded from harsh rhetoric, take this example. Joe Biden, asked if Palin as VP would be a step forward for women, said: ‘Look, I think the issue is: What does Sarah Palin think? What does she believe? I assume she thinks and agrees with the same policies that George Bush and John McCain think. And that’s obviously a backward step for women.’”
“A typical political shot? Not according to the RNC, which said the ‘arrogant’ remarks are ‘better suited for the backrooms of his old boys’ club,” while Palin is trying to break ‘the highest glass ceiling.’”
And what is this “glass ceiling” nonsense anyway? Last time I heard that term used, it was by Christie Whitman to justify picking her ultraliberal pal Debbie Poritz for the state Supreme Court.
As I said back in the Whitman era, you can’t break a glass ceiling with an airhead. And that goes for Sarah as well as Debbie.
Frankly, Palin lost me the minute those words came out of her mouth.
She also lost Larry Auster, over at the View From the Right blog. He has been dissecting this Palin thing from the beginning and on his blog he asks, “Do you really want to support a candidate who uses the leftist charge of ‘sexism’ against his opponent—and uses it on such a fraudulent basis as Obama’s unobjectionable “lipstick” comment?
“Is there no limit, no red line, beyond which you will say, ‘The Republicans under McCain have become a party of the left, manipulating images of patriotism to fool conservatives into voting for them’?”
As for us conservatives, it’s time to look for an alternative to the GOP ticket. There ain’t enough lipstick in the world to cover this Grand Old Pig.
Paul K. writes: