Object Lesson in Propaganda

It's a very old cliche.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

Obama used it in a speech to his adoring Democrat followers to describe John McCain's economic policies. The crowd clearly latched onto it as a backhanded slap against the GOP Veep nominee, who was famous for her joke about lipstick being the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. Therefore the cliche drew a standing derisive ovation from the partisan audience.

The other campaign seized on this apparent slight with amazing speed and created a YouTube ad questioning the judgement and character of the Democrat candidate. Other leftist partisans managed to add fuel to the fire with overtly slanderous comments comparing Gov. Palin to Pontius Pilate against Obama's Jesus and suggesting her only qualification for VP was that she hasn't had an abortion.

So Obama decided to respond to the McCain campaign's response to his lipstick cliche with his own outrage, suggesting that they were unfairly characterizing an innocent comment. He angrily called out the opposing campaign as outright liars for making a campaign issue out of something that he claimed never happened (i.e. calling Gov. Palin a pig).

Obama's sycophants in the media immediately set out to echo his outrage, showing multiple politicians (all Republicans, of course) using the overused lipstick/pig analogy, ending with the piece de resistance, McCain himself using it.

The whole incident is rather comical, but more instructive in the fact that both parties seem to view the American public as a mass of sheep who are easily fooled. I mainly wonder how many were fooled either way.

The conclusions about the phrase itself are pretty easy for any objective person. Just take the facts:

Obama's statement clearly was referring to McCain's economic policies and never mentioned Palin, even tangentially.

The crowd obviously connected the lipstick on pig to the lipstick on pit bull, thus the derisive standing ovation.

Did Obama intend the linkage? Maybe not, but certainly he understood the audience's linkage. For him to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. The projection of outrage against the opposing campaign for feigning their own outrage is sort of an outrage itself.

The opportunistic ad run by the McCain campaign was pretty effective, if misleading. It was a great example of taking something out of context to convey a message completely different from what was actually spoken.

Guilty of propaganda? Both sides.

Did it work? Hard to say, but it might be safe to assume the true believers on each side believed their own side's version of the story. I wonder how many understand the whole story. Those who do won't find anything on either side worthy of their support.