You gotta love politics.  At least that’s what they tell me.  I’m very much on the fence on that one.

What I do love is the humor of watching diehard Republicans run to the defense of Sarah Palin’s $150,000 makeover to make her look “presentable” on the campaign trail by either pointing to examples of lavish spending on the other side or by changing the subject entirely.

Sure, there was that $400 haircut John Edwards took so much flack about.  And it was absolutely justified.  No haircut is worth $400 unless the scalp itself could somehow immediately be removed from the head and put on display at the Louvre.  If it’s not worthy of being called a piece of art on that level, it’s not worthy of a $400 price tag.

The last haircut I got cost me about $30, and that included a shampoo, a tip and a bottle of this cool, minty shampoo that helps me actually begin to wake up.

Then there’s that lavish meal that Michelle Obama had at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York.  You know the one, right?  You’ve heard about this one…it has been a popular forward lately.  Two steamed lobsters — not one, but two, thank you — Irianian caviar, and a bottle of champagne…a lavish meal for a would-be First Lady before she even is a First Lady.

Of course, unlike the Edwards haircut, this Obama pig-out was a work of fiction.  According to Snopes.com, the day Michelle Obama is accused of ordering this pricey snack in the Big Apple, she was actually campaigning in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

But I have to admit, the Irianian caviar was a nice touch from the hate-mongers.  Still, heaven forbid that facts get in the way of a smear job.  And it begs the question:  if the other side is so much better, why would they even have to resort to a blatant lie to make themselves win points?

Another example of avoidance is a recent email that pulls quotes from Barack Obama’s books that seem to indicate that he’s going to transform America into some kind of Muslim stronghold.  I’ve gotten this one a few times, too.  The funny thing is, since I actually read The Audacity of Hope, it was painfully obvious that the writer of this email hadn’t.  What wasn’t absolutely made up was taken so far out of context that it might as well have been made up.

But the bottom line is this:  the Republicans were wrong to spend that money.  Period.  And to think that they had shown so much promise when they made fun of that haircut.

The same way Kerry was wrong to make military service a campaign issue in 2004, after he had been so right in condeming the practice when it was used against Bill Clinton in 1992.

Part of Palin’s appeal, apparently, is that she’s just a “regular gal.”  She’s “one of us.”  She and Joe the Plumber may not be neighbors, but they could hang out together sharing beer, nachos and a football game and it’d be completely natural.  She’s not fake, she’s not pretentious.  She is who she is and she’s fine with that.

So why does she need a $150,000 makeover?  Why spend that money?  If she’s so proud — and if she’s so right to be proud — of her modest, frugal ways, then why not parade that look around?

And please spare me the crap about the clothes not being hers.  Sure, they’ll be donated to charity so somewhere down the line some everyday woman will be able to wear a designer suit once worn by Palin herself.

Who cares?

If they’d really wanted to be so charitable, they’d have stayed away from the designer racks, gone to Target for whatever clothes they felt Palin really had to have, and donated the rest of that money to a local women’s shelter so that those women could have gone on a shopping spree for clothes for themselves and their children.  After all, $150,000 goes a lot further and could have helped a lot more people if designer brands weren’t in the mix.

I wish someone would give me a third of that money.  I’d show them what being frugal is really all about.