I hope that we can all agree that intelligence matters.  We’ve suffered through 8 years of a guy who isn’t that bright (just ask his Harvard Business School classmates, as I have, off the record), but who some of us apparently wanted to have a beer with.  Funny, I think he’s a teetotaler now, having drunk and snorted his way to near oblivionn, but I digress.

OK, intelligence matters.

While not perfect, the IQ test has a lot going for it.  It’s been around a long time.  It’s rather the de facto standard.  It doesn’t put too much weight on accumulated knowledge, but rather attempts to get to some core traits that define intelligence.

Now the top of the ticket is definitely more important than the second slot.  So here’s what we do.  We pick a day, make all four candidates show up.  We have a stern looking teacher-type there to administer the test.  Then we calculate the IQ’s of the candidates.  The candidate for President’s score is at face value (remember 100 is average, 85 is the highest end of retarded).  The Vice Presidential candidate’s score is 50% of face value.

Whichever ticket has the highest calculated score wins.  We call it a day.

So what do you think?  McCain?  Palin?  Obama?

… John McCain is the pig.

When the “controversy” first broke over Obama’s use of the old “lipstick on a pig – same old pig” statement, with the right wing blustering in fake outrage about the sexism of the statement, I didn’t think too much about it.  It seemed like more of the same ridiculousness at high volume you’d expect from the McCain campaign and O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck et al.

But at the gym this morning, it occurred to me why it’s stayed with me.  It’s true.  They just got the roles wrong.  You see they were trying to say that Obama called Palin a pig.

Obama should have said

“No, I wasn’t calling Sarah Palin a pig.  I was calling John McCain a pig.  You see, the saying refers to taking something that’s ugly (Bush’s failed policies) and dressing them up in different makeup and trying to sell them as something pretty.  And that’s what McCain is trying to do.  Remember when he was the ‘Experience candidate’?  Now it’s supposedly all about change.  Sorry, but McCain and his proposals are still pigs.”

But that would be too confrontational for the gentlemanly, cool, professorial Obama.

Now I suppose instead of saying that McCain is the pig, we could say that Bush’s policies are the pig, and McCain’s policies are the same pig with the lipstick of a McCain-Palin ticket, but that would lack the punch.  There’s something viscerally satisfying about saying that McCain is the pig, delicately sweetened with just the hint of guilty pleasure.  And anyway, if people couldn’t see the context of the Obama comment for what it was – a knock on the failed Bush policies, they’d miss the subtlety of the more refined argument anyway.

So Palin is the lipstick, McCain is the pig.  And you can put lipstick on the pig, but it’s still a pig.

So there.  I’ve said it.