Revisionist Admiration

I think this post by Tom Bevan is closest to my take on the "lipstick-pig" controversy. Bevan adds the important point that however the remark might have reasonably been taken it is clear how his audience took it. When we talk about the way we want our politics to sound that is about the ugliest thing I could imagine. I seem to be an outlier in taking meanings from how people put things. A politician should be judged on the meaning a reasonable person in his society would take something. On that test Obama is clearly in the wrong. There is another point, this one made by Bevan and one that had not occurred to me, that McCain would be the first to apologize for a word or phrase that could be taken as a racial slur, quite apart from how he himself meant it. Who has, after all, been marching around demanding that we all watch what we say and taking the worst possible meaning out of every utterance? Good on them.