The Desperation Is Back! ***UPDATED***

Convention bounce, Obama is up 8 points. Second convention bounce, McCain is up 9 points. So before the end of August they were close to dead even and now, after the conventions, we're back where we started. Some Democrats are worried because the White Women Demographic has swung toward McCain in a big way, 50% to 42%. But since the general number is back where it was, doesn't that mean Obama gained in all other categories to compensate?

Still, at least for today McCain is up a point. So why, today, did I see two of the most desperate talking points ever from Republicans?

Item number one: Hugh Hewitt et al accuses Obama of dissing Sarah Palin in a speech! The line "lipstick on a pig" according to them, obviously refers to Palin. Here's the clip that WHERE ARE MY KEYS put up to prove it:

A fasciating insult, lacking as it does ANY CONTEXT AT ALL IN THE SPEECH. Interestingly, McCain used the same expression last year, talking about Hillary Clinton's health care plan. So there is a little tempest raging over this, and the Obama people issued a statement that amounts to "Oh, come ON."

Enough is enough. The McCain campaign’s attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy – the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan just last year. This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run.

I gotta say also, Obama is savvy enough to know that crudely insulting your popular opponents femininity probably wouldn't win him back those white women. So I'm going to file this one under "implausible outrage."

Meanwhile my other favorite source of Conservative Outrage, Warner Todd Huston, offers this:

OBAMA LIES ABOUT SIGNING UP FOR THE DRAFT!!!!! ZOMG!!! (Okay, everything after the word "draft" was my addition.) Here's the talking point. On Sunday Obama talked to GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS and said this:

You know, I had to sign up for Selective Service when I graduated from high school. And I was growing up in Hawaii, and I had friend whose parents were in the military, there were a lot of Army, military bases there. And I always actually thought of the military as some ennobling and honorable option. But keep in mind: I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren't engaged in an active military conflict at that point. So it's not an option that I ever decided to pursue.

Huston, letting Newsbusters do his thinking for him, calls this a "lie" because: there was no selective service requirement in 1979! He's lying, don't you see!

I commented on the entry and asked Huston to explain what Obama hoped to gain by lying like that. After all, if he had failed to sign up and there HAD been a requirement, that would certainly be a scandal but this, this is nothing. Huston insists that Obama forgot when he signed up, and that's LYING. OMG!!!!

What I'm taking away from these two attempts to spin a scandal outta nothin' is that these guys are running scared. Not these two guys. The whole blogosphere. And that, more than anything else, makes me think that the Democrats got nothing to worry about. I mean, I suppose we shouldn't stop mentioning that Sarah Palin actually supported, and got money for, the Bridge to Nowhere (she just didn't spend it on the bridge) and that John McCain, well, we can just run his old quotes to bring him down. And that if the surge worked, why can't we send the troops home? But we have the luxury of not having to resort to character attacks. Especially weird ones.

***Upadate*** Anna Marie Cox, at Swampland: I don't think Obama meant anything crude with the phrase. And I didn't think the McCain campaign meant to portray Obama as the anti-Christ, either. Neither of these campaigns are quite as together as critics would like to believe. Amen, sistah, especially to that last part.