This post is titled:

Metaphors

I know, metaphors are difficult and slippery things, and most of us don't pay enough attention in Senior English to even bother trying to decipher them, so here's my interpretation of a couple of metaphors that were used recently by the next President of the United States of America, Barack Obama:

• "Lipstick" respresents Sarah Palin
• "A pig" represents Dick Cheney
• "Old fish" represents George W. Bush
• "A piece of paper called change" represents John S. McCain

Frankly, the last part of that is a little clumsy. Myself, I would have used "yesterday's newspaper" to represent John McCain and "rotten fish" to represent George Bush. He also could have clarified the whole thing, avoiding any deliberate misinterpretation by his opponents. I would have gone with:

You can put Sarah Palin's lipstick on the political pig of the Bush/Cheney administration, but it's still a pig. You can wrap the rotten fish of the neoconservative Republicans in yesterday's newspaper and label it "change," but after eight years it still stinks.

Anyway, the McCain campaign's supposed outrage over this epigram is a tempest in a teapot.

2008.09.10 at 10:00am EDT

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