Obama didn't really call Palin a pig, but he set himself up to be accused of it.
Obama tossed this out in a speech a little earlier:
"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig."
"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink."
"We've had enough of the same old thing."
Now you don't have to have studied literary symbolism in grad school (though I did) to know that Palin is the pig and McCain is the old fish. But that doesn't mean Obama was tagging either of them with these labels in any literal sense.
Imagine that one person at a company worked hard and kept to himself while another person complained incessantly about the pay and conditions. Imagine, then, that the complainer got rewarded with a modest raise while a share of his work got dumped on the first poor sap. You might be inclined to say, "The squeaky wheel got the grease." This in no way implies that the person in question was round with spokes or spoke in falsetto. Likewise, Obama didn't say that Palin is a pig or McCain is an old fish. He made remarks about them using common analogies to make his point.
But... just because Barack isn't in the wrong here, doesn't mean he's in the right. This is the man who has told us countless times what a faceless "They" will say to the public about him. And he's made it pretty clear that any criticism of him is to be dismissed as a racist lie. Having deliberately tried by his rhetoric to create a climate where we're hypersensitive to the most anodyne remark, he must now live in that climate, fighting for piety points with all the rest of society's aggrieved.
I tell ya, Barack, as a lover of language, of rhetoric and of politics, I hate to see it come to this, hate to see a world where you can't toss out a single good zinger without everyone coming after you. But you're the one who brought us here. If you're really The One, maybe you can lead us back.
