Lipstick on a Pig

Many of my friends are conservative. No, that’s an understatement. Most of them are so conservative that if you gave them a choice between wiping terrorism off the face of the earth or making abortions illegal, they’d have a hard time deciding between the two options.

It (more or less) goes without saying that they are also, like your average American, relatively ignorant of the details of our presidential election. Mostly they just parrot what they hear on Fox News. Most recently, a few of them got wind of the phrase “lipstick on a pig” in connection with the Obama campaign. They don’t know what it means or in what context it was spoken, just that it was aimed at the McCain camp. Most of them think for a minute, and make an incorrect connection between said phrase and Palin describing herself as a “bulldog with lipstick”. They realize that the word lipstick is present in both, and assume that Palin is being called a pig. They don’t know why she’s being called a pig, or how or when it started (they don’t even know that they’re completely wrong on the matter), but they know they’re angry as heck that their precious VP candidate has been insulted. It completely escapes them that not only is insulting the opposing party nothing new in the world of politics, their beloved GOP is the master of degrading implications and sly remarks.

A campaign button for Palin/McCain. Yes, I did that on purpose, just as whoever created the button did. They might as well get it over with and make McCain give her the nomination.

Here’s a great article detailing some of the prior uses of “lipstick on a pig”. This is nothing new – it’s been around at least 20 years, and has been used in far more direct ways than the most recent example.