Caddish Chauvinist Obama Attacks Palin's Appearance, Except Not Really

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So Barack Obama put his foot in it yesterday in Virginia, comparing the McCain campaign's mantra of change to the old adage about "putting lipstick on a pig." Naturally, this is being seized upon by those feminist pioneers of the right as an attack on lipstick-wearing GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and, by extension, everyone in this great country who has a vagina. It's patent nonsense—McCain used the same analogy for Hillary Clinton's health care plan—but that's not going to keep it from going wide: the McCain folks have already put together this ad, which is pretty effective. It's remarkably discouraging that the main substance of the race is the contest to see who can gin up the most outrage over trivial, manufactured bullshit, but that's pretty much what all campaigns are about these days. Obama, who may have been the biggest beneficiary of this kind of thing during the primaries, doesn't really have a lot of room to bemoan it.