Tag Archives: presidential campaign

The presidential campaign seems to have taken on a new life after the conventions and selection of vice president for each presidential candidate. But despite the spurt of energy and interest, it has not spawned any new or different ideas. Except one thing . . . a lot of rhetoric and interest in lipstick. A lot of lip service to lipstick. A ping-pong game with a tube of lipstick.”
 
Sarah Palin began the lipstick trend by mentioning it in her convention speech. Then Barack Obama paraphrased the famous saying, “a rose by any other name is still a rose” by saying, “You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”
 
One might be interested in checking back and reading the article I wrote a couple of months back about wild hogs in the Okefenokee Swamp and how to capture them by enticing the little pigs. But not with lipstick.
 
It might be more apropos for the candidates to talk about piggy banks in relation to how the economy has gotten so bad. Americans are losing their homes and scrambling through their piggy banks to meet the rising cost of  groceries. More talk about “mess kits” instead of makeup kits in what has become known as “lipstick politics.” Wow! What a diversionary tactic away from the real bread and butter issues today’s Americans are facing.
 
Taking their campaign issues from the ridiculous to the sublime, it seems as though both candidates have so mired themselves into a makeup issue, they have steered themselves away from the real makeover issues of change both were so hot to trot about.
 
I’m reminded of the fact that political government is a con game. Keep your eye on this ball while they are juggling with something else. Never has this been more glaringly apparent than this recent round of wrangling over words, back and forth, dominating the news over pigs with lipstick. Not even a Hollywood scriptwriter could have come up with anything better to point out the con game of diversionary tactics than the candidates themselves . . . a tube of lipstick.
 
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.”  This is not fiddling while Rome burns, but painting lips, to disguise what falls out of the mouth. If it were not for the seriousness of the matter, it would be downright comic. And no doubt fodder for the late night comic scene.
 
On the other hand, it offers nothing in the way of solutions to the problems this nation faces on the fast track to socialism and the erosion of individual freedom and dismantling of personal property rights . . . faster than the Democrats and Republicans dismantled all their fancy props at their convention sites.
 
If I were a songwriter looking for a title to a new song I would seriously consider, “How Dumb Thou Art.”
 
Now I don’t think the American people are dumb, but very smart, just being led down the wrong path in the frenzy of hype now so pervasive in this campaign. We are still free, able and capable of thinking.  Our memory seems a bit short, as we listen to so many political speeches absent any discussion about our most precious  possession, which is individual freedom. The question is, why are we tolerating the domination of talk about pigs with lipstick, ignoring any discussion about freedom? Is all the talk about lipstick on pigs just a diversion away from all the pork in Washington?
 
Let Freedom Ring!