Bunny with a Handgun

Sarah Palin is cute as a button. I admire a perky, smart, ambitious woman as much as the next person. I love that she's from a woodsy state like Alaska, wears big husky fur collars and was voted Miss Congeniality. How cute!

However (prepare yourself, o conservative reader) I believe that a woman's right to decide whether or not to carry and deliver a child is the most fundamental freedom. There is nothing more important. Without the right to decide for herself who lives inside her own body and when, a woman becomes no more than livestock. No man, no god, no party and no government has the right to make that decision. Cute though she may be, Sarah and her party are carrying hatchets meant to chop away my fundamental freedoms.

Nobody likes abortion. It's an ugly word that no one likes to say. I would love to live in a world where education, planning and prevention made abortion obsolete. So what if her "abstinence only" policy with her own children left her own young daughter high and dry?

According to the Washington Post, "The choice of Sarah Palin smacks of desperation..." She is being dangled before us, a cute hand-puppet, a spunky mom with troubles of her own, to distract us, to give the impression of change where there is none. Everybody loves moms, right? So what if it's an anti-gay mom?

It is almost unbelievable that Sarah Palin is being offered as an alternative to disenfranchised women who felt defeated when Hillary Clinton did not win the nomination. (Except that I'd believe just about anything at this point.) As long as the women in question don't really care what a woman in power believes, as long as she's a woman. As long as they don't give a hoot about the rights of their friends, their neighbors, or their daughters.

Lisa Schiffren, speechwriter for Dan Quayle (talk about the blind leading the blind!) says: "Talk about a role model for our daughters: Annie Oakley in the halls of power! With a newborn . . . and a son serving in Iraq. I am giddy!" Hmmm...except I think Annie Oakley might have been a lesbian, and therefore a non-person in Sarah's world, the newborn is her underage daughter's, and she thinks exploiting the Alaskan wilderness is the way to get us out of Iraq. Sorry, son!