Late to the party on lipstick, pigs, and such

I guess my title fits both the specific lipstick incident as well as blogging generally. I'm not a technophobe or Luddite, but have used the Internet mainly for e-mail, news, sports, shopping, etc. but never done much with blogging or social networking sites until just recently. With so many blogs, I figured I had not much to add to the the already-overloaded "blogosphere" and that assessment hasn't necessarily changed: I don't suddenly that I have better things to say, but I did keep thinking of stuff that I wanted to express somewhere, and which didn't seem to fit so well on Facebook, so I figured I'd try this. My guess is that mostly/only friends and family will follow this, and likely not even all of them, but maybe someone else will find some of this interesting.

On the belabored lipstick comments a while back, the only thoughts I wanted to share on it are maybe a compilation and synthesis of many of the takes on it I've heard, the main one I remember being Pat Buchanan on Imus in the Morning. Whether or not Obama began the event planning to use the line (approximately, No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig) the audience certainly made the connection to Palin's joke (Difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? Lipstick) as evidenced by their loud cheers and reaction to what is otherwise a normal speech and metaphor. Obama's smart, right? Do you think he remembered Palin's comments just a few days before, and thought his crowd would like his reference?

In my gut, I gotta believe that he knew what he was doing, and also knew that it was just a deft/subtle enough dig at her that he could make the comment and also sidestep the brouhaha that followed. He wasn't really calling her a pig, or doing anything so terrible, just poking fun at and making reference to the little joke of a political opponent. I don't think that this makes him a terrible person, and I do think that the McCain campaign overreacted to it, but everyone hides behind "playing politics" and we roll forward through the rancor, half-truths, and general nasty atmosphere of politics as we finally approach the actual voting day in this years-long election process. And despite all the polls and politicking, the only result that decides and truly matters is the vote of the people on November 4th.

I've also been thinking about all the nastiness in politics, and our country's financial woes, and the intersection of the two as Congress struggled to pass a measure to help out. But I'll save that for later.