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Refering to somebody (especially a lady) as a pig is mean, even if you were using an idiom.
HI JOE!
I've been wondering, how do all of these undecided voters decide who to vote for? It seems like politics is so surface level (what with a whole news cycle devoted to a pig quote), and nobody ever addresses 'the issues' in any kind of depth, while all the while complaining about the fact that nobody ever talks about the issues (kind of like me right now). If it weren't for the fact that I vote based on a few very specific criteria, I don't think I'd ever be able to figure out which circles to ink on my ballot.
If you remember back a few years, Kerry made a similar gaff when he implied that our troops were 'uneducated' (ie, stupid) and 'stuck in Iraq' and then tried to pretend that his words had been misunderstood. If you go and look at what he said, it was carefully calculated so that he could make that insult without being called out. Unfortunately for Kerry, neither the American people nor her troops are stupid or uneducated, so he created a huge PR catastrophe. Obama can't get away with directly calling Palin a pig, and so his people came up with a way to make the connection without actually stooping to blatant namecalling, knowing that his audience would understand the implications of the idiom. Which they did; the line was followed by thunderous laughter and applause.
So basically, I think that McCain was using the idiom to attack his opponent's policies, and Obama was using it to slyly attack his opponent.
Refering to somebody (especially a lady) as a pig is mean, even if you were using an idiom.
HI JOE!
I agree it's stupid that the media makes it seem like the election is about this kind of garbage far more than it is about the state of our nation.
I've been wondering, how do all of these undecided voters decide who to vote for? It seems like politics is so surface level (what with a whole news cycle devoted to a pig quote), and nobody ever addresses 'the issues' in any kind of depth, while all the while complaining about the fact that nobody ever talks about the issues (kind of like me right now). If it weren't for the fact that I vote based on a few very specific criteria, I don't think I'd ever be able to figure out which circles to ink on my ballot.
I agree it's stupid that the media makes it seem like the election is about this kind of garbage far more than it is about the state of our nation.
I don't think the lipstick on a pig was in reference to Palin. I think that it was just a poor choice of words used and perhaps, I'd also agree with Randy that, well, in my words, the back and forth game is exhausting and I'd like to see Politics that don't get like that.
Canada is beginning an election campaign and sad to say is that it's beginning to look like the Presidential campaign ... you can put a lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig...lol....not that I am saying this is a bad thing but this is just my observation. Canada is becoming more and more like the States. I could go on but I don't want to both the yankee's and southerners with Canadian stuff. :)
Perhaps Obama just didn't make a wise choice in words given what Palin had said prior.
The problem with what you're presuming happened is that Obama didn't make "a poor choice of words" on the spur of the moment. His public statements and speeches are written for him by his staff, and reviewed by himself and multiple members of that staff. There is no way that a room full of a dozen very smart people who have been completely immersed in this campaign missed the fact that the line about lipstick would be seen as a reference to the most popular and important line of Palin's acceptance speech, but that an audience immediately picked up on it.
American political speeches very often tend to be composed of lines that are oblique references to much larger issues (rather than speeches about the large issues, hence the lack of depth in our campaign coverage). Because of this audiences are listening to every line and trying to fill in the references. Obama's speech writers know this, and they would have realized what people were going to assume he meant, even if they didn't originally intend that meaning. They chose not to fill in with another idiom, and this reaction is what they're getting for it.
But then again, I think with Obama he just might have the tenacity to say something live that hadn't been rehersed before hand. He gives me that kind of impression. I can almost hear his team saying, "Obama, what were you thinking out there?"
Obama is famously terrible when he does do interviews and debates unscripted, see the paygrade comment at Saddleback (plus, if you pay attention to him in interviews and such, with no teleprompter, he tends to say um or some other kind of crutch word constantly, which is extremely annoying).
But when candidates do go off the script, as with Sarah Palin's pit bull joke or Obama at Saddleback, we know because their speeches are released before hand to the media so the real deal can be checked against the script, and their campaigns like to trumpet their 'authentic' moments when they come across well (Hillary crying, anyone?) and use it as an excuse when they fall flat. The Obama campaign has not said that the remark was extemporaneous. Obama delivered an ill-considered scripted line, and he is reaping the whirlwind.
If you remember back a few years, Kerry made a similar gaff when he implied that our troops were 'uneducated' (ie, stupid) and 'stuck in Iraq' and then tried to pretend that his words had been misunderstood. If you go and look at what he said, it was carefully calculated so that he could make that insult without being called out. Unfortunately for Kerry, neither the American people nor her troops are stupid or uneducated, so he created a huge PR catastrophe. Obama can't get away with directly calling Palin a pig, and so his people came up with a way to make the connection without actually stooping to blatant namecalling, knowing that his audience would understand the implications of the idiom. Which they did; the line was followed by thunderous laughter and applause.
So basically, I think that McCain was using the idiom to attack his opponent's policies, and Obama was using it to slyly attack his opponent.
I don't think the lipstick on a pig was in reference to Palin. I think that it was just a poor choice of words used and perhaps, I'd also agree with Randy that, well, in my words, the back and forth game is exhausting and I'd like to see Politics that don't get like that.
Canada is beginning an election campaign and sad to say is that it's beginning to look like the Presidential campaign ... you can put a lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig...lol....not that I am saying this is a bad thing but this is just my observation. Canada is becoming more and more like the States. I could go on but I don't want to both the yankee's and southerners with Canadian stuff. :)
Perhaps Obama just didn't make a wise choice in words given what Palin had said prior.
The problem with what you're presuming happened is that Obama didn't make "a poor choice of words" on the spur of the moment. His public statements and speeches are written for him by his staff, and reviewed by himself and multiple members of that staff. There is no way that a room full of a dozen very smart people who have been completely immersed in this campaign missed the fact that the line about lipstick would be seen as a reference to the most popular and important line of Palin's acceptance speech, but that an audience immediately picked up on it.
American political speeches very often tend to be composed of lines that are oblique references to much larger issues (rather than speeches about the large issues, hence the lack of depth in our campaign coverage). Because of this audiences are listening to every line and trying to fill in the references. Obama's speech writers know this, and they would have realized what people were going to assume he meant, even if they didn't originally intend that meaning. They chose not to fill in with another idiom, and this reaction is what they're getting for it.
But then again, I think with Obama he just might have the tenacity to say something live that hadn't been rehersed before hand. He gives me that kind of impression. I can almost hear his team saying, "Obama, what were you thinking out there?"
Obama is famously terrible when he does do interviews and debates unscripted, see the paygrade comment at Saddleback (plus, if you pay attention to him in interviews and such, with no teleprompter, he tends to say um or some other kind of crutch word constantly, which is extremely annoying).
But when candidates do go off the script, as with Sarah Palin's pit bull joke or Obama at Saddleback, we know because their speeches are released before hand to the media so the real deal can be checked against the script, and their campaigns like to trumpet their 'authentic' moments when they come across well (Hillary crying, anyone?) and use it as an excuse when they fall flat. The Obama campaign has not said that the remark was extemporaneous. Obama delivered an ill-considered scripted line, and he is reaping the whirlwind.