Palin around with pigs

We’ve heard about a gentleman that was allegedly palling around with terrorists. But it seems like someone else has being palling around too? Not with terrorists this time though, no no that would be wrong, but with pigs. And she has, without preconditions…

Remember this statement, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”? If you’ve been following the US Presidential Election closely, I’m sure it’ll ring a bell. It was one of the two major gaffes during one of the many heated periods of the campaign. In fact they were the words of Barack Obama, just days after John McCain chose an unknown figure in Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate. At the time, this popular American expression was seen by the republican as a major blunder from the very mouth of a man they almost labelled a sexist. Subsequently, Obama came out to defend his comment as being just about McCain’s policies rather than about his much talked about running mate; Sarah Palin. Even though most hardcore republican didn’t buy that argument, the inferno died down anyway.

But perhaps Obama’s use of that idiom had more to it than he admitted. As you all know, this guy rarely says anything that he hasn’t quite thought through, and he’s too calculated a guy to drop such a bombshell by mistake. Well, it came to pass as reports began to filter out early last week that the Republican Party had spent $150,000 on Palin’s image makeover, lipstick on a pig didn’t sound to me as just about policies anymore. It’s quite remarkable actually, considering that that she was already a governor, and she still needed $150k worth of image makeover, she must have been in pretty messy state – not easy to govern the great state of Alaska I guess but that’s still a lot of lipsticks all the same.

Moreover, I suppose what her party forgot to do was a character makeover of this moose riding, bird shooting, hockey playing woman from freezing cold Alaska who thinks Russia is just a stone-throw from her living room. Reason being, I thought the true values of Christianity were values like decency, fairness, purity, morality, love etc. Christianity means you can disagree with someone in every way, but not necessarily have to brand and paint them evil or change their second name to Lucifer. True Christianity I used to think was that you pursue your ambition and fight for it in every way, but never forget the golden rule; “do unto others as you want done unto you”.

However, none of these values have shone through this “Christian” woman so far in this campaign. Rather, her mouth has been filled with somewhat bigotry and to some extent uncouth words. I guess her political ambition somehow made her forget her Christian values. It’s ok for her to say she’s against homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc but then she could not pass a simple message of “abstinence” to her daughter who is now pregnant at age 19. So who’s she to teach the world ethics?

Maybe then Obama saw it coming. Think about it, one main character known with pigs is that no matter how you make them up, they will still find a way to get dirty. So when Obama said you can put a lipstick on pig but it’s still a pig, maybe what he really was saying is you can spend $150K or more on Sarah Palin’s image but she’s still Sarah Palin – a dirty governor of Alaska. We might never find the true meaning of that expression, but it seems like Palin has been palling around with pigs all the same.