Fuck, I think any good metaphor is technically sexist by McCain standards.  She loves them like a gender-neutral and completely equal individual loves a non-gendered object which would be a common and comically fervent object of desire for said individual?  Yeah, that rolls off the tongue.

The hilarious thing is that this sort of thing has long been a classic complaint about feminism from the right.  That Those Evil Feminists are in Yr Languidge,  Steeling Yr Non-Gender-Netural Idiomatic Constructions.  It’s always been “heehee, the FEMINISTS are trying to make me say Congressperson and Mailperson and I mean where does the buck stop?  Will we have to say ovacular instead of seminal?  Personpower instead of Manpower?  Will we have to Person The Battle Stations?  Hee Heee Hee!”

Now it seems like the ones full of complaint about sexism in everyday language   are the Republicans.

Like Homer Simpson likes his donuts.

(insert loud chewing noises)

“Pork”, “bacon”, gee MikeEss, who are you implying is a pig?

And Jesse, “pulling ... Abram ... off” what kind of veiled sexual innuendo was that? 

You liberals need to be more careful!

Population genetics is a very important part of conservation efforts, so I can think of several different reasons why we would want to know about bear DNA. It does seem like they got a lot of money for their project, but science costs a lot of money.

My favorite part of the “I Said No to the Bridge To Nowhere” story is that she still took the money.

Actually the part that’s even better is that she still built the road to nowhere that was supposed to connect to the bridge but now dead-ends at the beach. Because the money for THAT would have had to be given back to the Feds if the road weren’t built.

“[S]eminal quote”? Are you taking a pot shot at McCain’s potency buster? Is this another case of librul ageism?

Omg, it’s so funny that you used that particular metaphor as your blog title…I was discussing the “lipstick on a pig” brouhaha with the boyfriend last night—he got a good chuckle out of finding out that McCain had used it himself just last year in reference to one of Hillary’s platform ideas—and I was like, “Yeah, I heard that growing up all the time—kinda like ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ too, they’re both country-isms.”

It’s like pulling a half-Abramoff!

It’s like the way in John McCain’s mental fantasy world that you can steal as much as you want, and it’s ok as long as you’re not a robber.

Essentially, Sarah Palin, the genderless earmark monarch of Alaska, is absolved of the massive corruption that John McCain believes she would otherwise be part and parcel of because she’s not as corrupt as other people.

Hey, it worked to convince people that everything was A-OK at Abu Ghraib because, after all, we weren’t as bad as Saddam with the beating and the killing and the raping.  So if some other people were greedier about earmarks than Palin (even though she got the highest per capita amount of earmarks), that means she’s clean as a whistle and how DARE you talk about her ears?!?!?!?!?

No, no. All of this is a character issue. If you’re not a corrupt person, then when you do corrupt things it’s really OK. You know, just like it’s not illegal if the president authorizes it.

Palin kept it

Actually, Daily Howler claims the state spent some of the money before Palin took over as governor. The site also says Palin explicitly put her signature on the decision to kill the bridge because Congress wouldn’t give the project any more money.

It’s pretty obvious that Sarah Palin loves earmarks like…

Fuck, I think any good metaphor is technically sexist by McCain standards.

A huge pity.  When it comes to politicians and money, there’s an obvious and apt metaphor which would no doubt immediately set people screaming when applied to a female politician.

The site also says Palin explicitly put her signature on the decision to kill the bridge because Congress wouldn’t give the project any more money.

... and then kept the money that was given to Alaska for the bridge and spent it on other projects.

If she hadn’t been campaigning on the Bridge to Nowhere, she could have said, “Since the money had already been allocated, I used it for other infrastructure projects that the state needed more.”  But she didn’t.  She claimed to be a reformer who was against the Bridge from the beginning, when that’s clearly not true from what she said during her campaign for governor.

To give her lying some credit for ingenuity, I think what she’s been saying is that she knew well enough that Congress was spending too much money on the bridge project, so she said both “Thanks, but no thanks” _and_ “If we need a bridge, we’ll build it ourselves.”  That’s supposed to give her an out—she helped the American people with the “no thanks” and then helped the Alaskan people [remember, she thinks they’re separate!] with the “building it ourselves,” or at least with the due diligence of considering whether to build it or not, on Alaskan terms and for Alaskan benefit.  That can all work without her having to pose as having been against the bridge project from the start—she wants to say the feds offered it as a kind of hand-out, but she was so self-reliant that she wouldn’t accept it that way; she’d have to evaluate it with stoic rigor.  That way if she said “No,” it would be regrettable, but governors sometimes have to make hard decisions.  Sigh.

So, to be more clear about it, I think her story is, “The government was going to give Alaska an expensive bridge for free, but I said that we in Alaska were capable of making our own decisions about bridges, and ultimately I decided that ‘No’ was the right answer.”  Not that she was always against it, but that she always thought it should be a local matter.

Of course the power of the story derives from the notion that she’s so ethical and civic-minded that she turns down gifts and luxuries that other lesser life forms would rush to accept:  free bridges, free planes, free gourmet meals from a personal chef…  What a crock.  You can tell that she makes no distinction between herself and the government, which is very autocratic and banana-republican.

So, to be more clear about it, I think her story is, “The government was going to give Alaska an expensive bridge for free, but I said that we in Alaska were capable of making our own decisions about bridges, and ultimately I decided that ‘No’ was the right answer.” Not that she was always against it, but that she always thought it should be a local matter.

And yet—and this is what always kills me with this story—she kept the money that was supposed to be used for the bridge and put it towards other projects.  So she can’t say, “We didn’t take their dirty Washington money”—she couldn’t stuff it into the treasury fast enough.  It’s not much of a principle to turn a project down if you keep the money that someone gave you to spend on it.

It’s a heroic story of taking Washington’s money without taking any of their direction about how to use it.  If you’re a Republican, that’s the best of all possible worlds.

It’s a heroic story of taking Washington’s money without taking any of their direction about how to use it.  If you’re a Republican, that’s the best of all possible worlds.

Why does a Republican’s best possible world always involve playing games with other peoples’ money?

Why does a Republican’s best possible world always involve playing games with other peoples’ money?

Because every time they read about Robin Hood, they thought the Sheriff was the hero of the story.