Posted by
Chris on Thursday, September 11, 2008 2:21:36 AM
With great respect to Townhall authors and my fellow conservatives:
An article on the main blog page a few hours ago said that Obama was "...defending his slam at Sarah Palin as a pig by denying that's what he meant, though everyone in his audience and across the country instantly knew that is exactly what he meant."
Actually, there are some notable exceptions, including Dennis Prager, Bill O'Reilly, John Kasich, and Dennis Miller, who have all gone on record saying they don't believe that's what he meant. Further, Ramesh Ponnuru and Kathryn Jean Lopez over at National Review are blogging on The Corner about how the McCain camp is messing up the response. Here's Ponnuru:
"... there may have been good ways to take shots at Obama over the "lipstick on a pig" comment. But the Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don't they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are trashing her brand. They're undermining the basis of her appeal as a different, tougher kind of female politician. Today has been worse than wasted."
And here's Lopez:
"I said earlier to a colleague or two that I had this awkward feeling earlier today, the kind of feeling I had when George Allen's campaign started attacking Jim Webb for writings against women in combat. We, of course, agreed with most of what he had written on the issue. For a conservative to start crying sexism was ridiculous. Please don't follow that lead, McCain-Palin 2008. I'm heartened, as I noted in my piece today, that Palin hasn't taken up the sexism whine herself. Based on her past comments, I don't imagine she will. And I'd like to believe she cringed, too, when she watched the "lipstick" ad. "
Dick Morris also thinks Palin ought to just dismiss it with a clever comment and a smile.
So evidently I (along with Hollywood and Stephen) am not alone in thinking this is a not an issue on which we should keep pounding away. The response from the right is sounding too much like the left. Just my two cents.