I'm going to continue trying to keep politics off this blog if I can.  But my entire country has gone political so it makes it  hard.

That said, I still think the topic is largely pointless.

In that vein I wanted to take one of the more ridiculous political situations to arise in the last few weeks and use it to once more make the point that discussing this stuff is pointless.  With that said, lets take a quick break from Tech to look at the now infamous "Lipstick on a Pig Incident"

What's the difference between the presidential campaign before and after the national political conventions? Lipstick. The colorful cosmetic has become a political buzzword, thanks to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's joke in her acceptance speech that lipstick is the only thing that separates a hockey mom like her from a pit bull.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama told an audience Tuesday that GOP presidential nominee John McCain says he'll change Washington, but he's just like President Bush.

"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin's joke even if it's not what Obama meant. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

First thing to understand is that every politician has a hard core base.  Those folks that are so far out there that the candidate probably doesn't really want their support but at the same time knows they need it in such a closely split country.

So Politicians, all politicians, have to throw the fringe a bone every once in a while.  The way they do that (without offending everyone else) is to make statements that, while seemingly innocuous to anyone not completely filled with hate for the other side, speak directly to these crazed nut jobs. 

That's what the "lipstick on a pig" comment was about.  To the 90% of Obama supporters who are...well...normal the comment didn't mean anything but to that crazy 10% who read hate into everything it was a direct attack on Palin. 

(Notice how even the ABCNews author quoted above said the Obama was "clearly drawing a connection to Palin's joke" even though, imho, it wasn't clear at all)

So basically this is just good political strategy.  The Obama campaign wanted to placate the crazies so they could essentially ignore them from that point on (which he has to do to win the moderates).

Now the McCain camp knows exactly what Obama is doing because, to be blunt, they do it too.  But they're trying to push the "Democrats are secretly misogynists so Women should vote for us" angle (again good political strategy) so they latch onto the comment and feign outrage at it. 

Which in turn causes Obama to defend himself by feigning outrage and their outrage. Then tomorrow the McCain camp will feign even greater outrage at Obama's feigned outrage which was in response to their original feigned outrage.  And so on...

It's all theater and I guarantee you the whole thing is as scripted as anything you'll see on TV.   Honestly, it drives me crazy.

Anyway, just another reason why I don't talk Politics on this site.