Cross posted at dkos

I am on an email list of women who were all pregnant together nearly 12 years ago. That's all we have in common. There are radical left-wingers, radical right-wingers, activists of all stripes and everyone in between. They just finished a ferocious debate about Sarah Palin and the attacks on her as a mother.

I didn't say a word, which is weird because when it comes to politics, I'm usually up front with the quips trying to sway the moderates. I wanted to wait until I could come up with a list (and control my temper), because I wanted to give the independents and swing voters in the group something to really think about. This is what I told them:

I think she's drop-dead gorgeous.

I think Tina Fey had better come back to SNL to play her in the skits.

I think she's a dynamic speaker.

I think she's closely tied to Ted Stevens.

I think it's no one's business but hers and Todd's how they run their family life.

I think she's a secessionist who is more loyal to Alaska than the Union.

I think she's a force to be reckoned with.

I think she's talking out of both sides of her mouth when she says she killed the Bridge to Nowhere but then it turns out she was for it before she was against it, and kept the earmarked funds for it in any event.

I think she's talking out of both sides of her mouth when she says she's against earmarks in the first place but then it turns out she hired a lobbyist to make sure Wasilla got as many earmarks as possible.

I think there's a very good chance that as the Troopergate and Dairygate scandals continue to be investigated it'll turn out that she has seriously abused her power as governor.

I think I'm sorry for Bristol's boyfriend--he looked like a deer in the headlights, and his MySpace page said he never intended to have children--but then, my cousin married at 18 and they're still happily married 30 years later, so who knows? Not my business. Just a thought.

I think I'm also sorry for her son, Track. He's in the military allegedly because he was given the choice of signing up or going to jail for vandalizing schoolbuses. If she gets elected, I won't feel too sorry for him, because it'll be a certainty he'll get pulled out of a combat position; it's too great a security risk (and I would support that--we can't have a leader's kid getting taken hostage by an opposing force).

I think she's not so much with the budgeting since she took office in Wasilla with a surplus and left it $22m in debt when she left.

I think this election had better not be a referendum on Sarah Palin but on the last eight years of Republican governance. McCain's current slogan? "Reform, Prosperity, Peace"--all things we LOST under the last eight years of Republican governance. Did you hear the speeches from Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain himself, about how we need to flush the alligators out of the Washington swamp? Who's been running the country?! They're campaigning against themselves! That's how bad the last eight years have been. That's how great a failure the Republicans have been in office.

I think that I don't want a right-wing government making decisions for me, and we'll get more, much more, of that if John McCain has the pick of the next Supreme Court justices.

I think Palin and McCain think we're stupid, and that we'll fall for the GOP's usual "Gays, Guns and God" tactics of fear over substance, fear over hope, fear over change. "Community organizers" are somehow now the enemy of the common people. As someone else said, just remember: Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor.

I think that Palin and McCain are extremists who don't share the values of the vast majority of the American public. Americans believe that we are one nation, a union, that we work together, that we don't torture, that we don't go to war without just cause, that the government should work for the people not for the cronies of the governing, that we can solve the energy crisis by pulling together and investing in the future--alternatives and conservation--not the dwindling oily past, that we don't leave cities to drown and crumbling bridges to collapse, that we appoint people to agencies like FEMA and the US attorneys' offices because they know something about the job, not because they passed a political litmus test or because someone owed someone else a favor.

Instead, I think that Palin and McCain share George Bush and Dick Cheney's values--that the executive branch of government is above the law, that spying on Americans is okay, that torturing people is okay, that women's bodies are public property, that private militias accountable to no one should take over big chunks of the responsibilities of our armed forces, that shipping jobs overseas is great for business, that mortgaging our children's future to China is awesome, that balanced budgets don't matter, that the mortgage crisis doesn't matter, that we can drill our way out of the energy crisis, that the rich are their political base, and that the struggling and disappearing middle class are whiners.

That's what I think.

How about you, moms?