What a terrible idea! Who would put lipstick on a pig? If we start putting lipstick on livestock, will cats and dogs be far behind? Look at what my brother Apollo would look like with lipstick! Not such a pretty picture! (although he's still a darn cute cat) Maybe that's the point of the old joke... Oh yeah, now I get it! New words don't make a bad policy good (and lipstick doesn't make a cat ugly)....
If you take a minute to listen to what Barack Obama was saying right before he used the lipstick on a pig joke, you would find that he was making a point about how McCain's economic plan would not create real change from what George Bush's policies have been. We cats think moving attention away from issues like the economy means people don't talk about who has the best ideas!
As the investigative cat of the group, I took a few minutes to look up the recent history of this joke about lipstick on a pig.
- Last October, when asked about Hillary Clinton's health care plan, John McCain said Clinton's proposal was "eerily" similar to the plan she proposed in 1993. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig," he said, "but it's still a pig."
- McCain's former press secretary, Torie Clarke, wrote a book called "Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era."
- Vice President Cheney used the expression at a campaign stop in Hawaii in 2004 when talking about John Kerry's proposals.
In my research on Google and in Youtube I was able to quickly locate lots of videos of the McCain comments about Hillary Clinton's health care plan and I saw it this morning on The Today Show while I was sitting with my humans. Here's a video that doesn't give any commentary but just shows the 2 comments back to back.
- Starbuck
www.Cats4Obama.com
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