The McCain campaign is getting awfully touchy since Sarah Palin came on board.  Today, at a campaign stop in Virginia, Barack Obama used a common idiom to describe the latest McCain campaign theme:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.

“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.”

Playing the hurt feelings card, Jane Swift, the head of the McCain campaign’s “Palin Truth Squad”, had this response:

Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift tonight flatly stated that Obama had called Palin a pig.

“[T]he formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn’t have happened too soon, as we saw when Sen. Obama in Lebanon, Va., this evening uttered what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig,” Swift said.

“Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology,” she said.

Later she would suggest that Obama had called McCain a stinky fish.  Seriously.

It sounds to me like Swift said something really dumb, realized it, but didn’t want to reverse herself.  So she tried to rationalize it, to make it sound not-so-dumb:

When one reporter asked Swift why she assumed the remarks were directed at Palin, Swift replied: “It seemed to me a gendered comment. There’s only one woman in the race.”

“As far as I know, she’s the only one of the four — the presidential and vice presidential candidates — who wears lipstick,” Swift said.

But like I always say, you can’t polish a turd.  (No, I’m not calling Jane Swift a turd.)