"Lipstick on a Pig"

So, got up this morning on little sleep, groggily sat down to read news during caffeine uptake, misread story, begin writing the following:

Jesus, what is the deal with this lame reaction to McCain's "lipstick on a pig" claim? C'mon. This is one of the bigger stretches I've ever seen. Saying that attempts to rehabilitate Clinton's health care plan is like putting lipstick on a pig is a vastly different thing than saying that Clinton is somehow a pig. This is just vapid partisan stupidity. Just because they do this stuff doesn't mean we have to do it...

But then it turned out that that people were pointing to the McCain comment in order to defend Obama because, as I suppose I should have guessed, it is, in fact, the McCain camp that's trying to distort Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comment.

This asinine, dishonest attack on Obama is something that, in a perfect world, we wouldn't even have to dignify with a response. The fact that it's imperative that we respond is one measure of the distance between our world and that one. But, as I just saw Marc Ambinder or some such guy note, the "lipstick on a pig" locution is one Obama is fond of and uses in many contexts--and, of course, McCain used it about Clinton's proposals. So it's clearly not the kind of attack that the ever-more-pathologically-dishonest McCain camp is making it out to be.

Oh, and: it's not like it's an unusual locution or anything.

It's like some kind of really bad, nightmarish joke. Are these people just rotten to the core or what?