To dispense with the point, yes, he was absolutely referring to McCain and Palin with the pig/lipstick/old fish remarks. What may seem ambiguous and arguable in plain black and white print is absolutely crystal clear when viewing the video clip - the timing, delivery, and non-verbals as he plays the crowd like a talented musician plays a guitar, followed by the self-satisfied snickering after delivering this little flaming bag of rhetorical poo and ringing the doorbell, with full knowledge of what he’d just done… deliberately.

Unless you’re ridiculous enough to actually believe Barack Hussein Obama isn’t a sharp, shrewd operator, reconsider the ‘lipstick on a pig’ remarks from a completely calculating and cynical perspective -

In using indirect symbology, Obama simultaneously throws red meat to his followers, who have been anything but a bunch of shrinking violets in the personal hatchet catching contests so far, with ‘arguable ambiguity’ to treat the incident as a non-issue (Well, he obviously wasn’t referring to McCain and Palin!); while setting a trap of sorts for his adversaries to get caught up in, thereby engaging in more noise generation. The aim appears to be make sure it’s coming from everywhere possible, and sounds as silly as possible as quickly as possible.

Because each and every minute occupied with cover noise resembling a slap fight elevated to the forefront of headlines, aggregators, and anchor desks, is less time for stories concerning things like the Annenberg Challenge and Obama’s much deeper, much more extensive partnership (no, not in a legal sense) with William Ayers than he’d like everyone to believe, with greater scrutiny placed upon the agenda that Obama actively helped realize. At the risk of dismissal for alarmist red-baiting (what the heck, go for it! - ed.), a quite blatantly Marxist/Socialist agenda, by the looks of it.

Misfit kid told of a magical land by an unabashed communist as a youth, eventually setting his footsteps along the path described by Saul Alinsky, impressing with his people skills and getting a shot at Harvard Law, to becoming the polished bagman and broker for an unreconstructed but critically connected Weatherman domestic terrorist, parlaying the influence into a classic kick the stool from under the opposition entrance to the Chicago political machine and access to that system’s movers and shakers. And the rest, as they say, depends upon your party affiliation.

Actually a fascinating trajectory, in a made for TV Movie mini-series kinda way. One where the central characters you were presented as the heros suddenly turn out to have an interesting and disturbing back story - that they really would rather not talk about.

That’s great entertainment, but in the here and now, the disturbing back story in question is a discredited ideology which, when put into practice during the 20th century, resulted in the deaths of millions upon millions of people. Er, no thanks.

The Cold War era novel, The Charm School lays out the premise of the KGB operating a complete immersion training facility, to train adolescent Russians to be “American”, so they could be slipped into US society undetected, and rise to positions of relative importance, all the while being Soviet sleepers. Anyway, fascinating concept, but pure fiction. The point to take away from the tale is the scenario of the play for the long game - the investments made in the story were not expected to bear fruit for fifteen to twenty years.

Which, co-incidentally, is on a rough order of scale the timeframe we’re looking at for Obama’s rise from a misfit, talented, and impressionable adolescent drinking in the wisdom of an old communist in Hawaii, to his appearance on the national stage at the Boston Democratic Convention in 2004. Counseled, assisted, and networked with dedicated Leftist Radicals, facilitated and gentrified by assorted Chicago machine fixers, it’s a journey Obama and his handlers want to keep out of focus for as long as they possibly can.

This explains the apparent lack of any sort of effective response to ‘thin resume’ attacks from the Obama camp - because it ain’t truly that thin, and what it says ain’t real pretty, either. At least that was their tactic until presented with the gift of Palin (still an excellent tactical and strategic choice), and the subject could become just another he said/she said back and forth mud match, with enough obfuscation thrown in to completely obscure the issue.

Here’s a quote, which you can assign your own rating of importance with regards to the story -

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
V. I. Lenin

Someone recently used the analogy of isolated Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific fighting on long after Japan surrendered - and it’s fitting to the scenario - not giving up in the face of apparently obvious defeat, but still running the old playbook, hoping to keep the movement going, and maybe get lucky.

Capturing the chief executive’s job of the nation that exemplifies the free market, capitalist system’s greatest success sounds like it would be pretty lucky for them, now wouldn’t it?