Honeys … please! Give me a break. I had no intention of "lecturing" you on how to treat Sarah Palin . I just wanted us to calm down a bit about the incipient GOP vice president before our furor at this veep choice explodes in our faces. And backfires on us.

Let’s get things totally straight here. I wasn’t backtracking. I haven’t changed my mind; I could never vote for a ticket that had Sarah Palin on it. She is anti almost everything I believe in except “the zipper and the dial telephone,” as Tallulah once opined of Republican candidate Tom Dewey. 

I would ride to hell in a handbasket for the talented Julia Reed and for my other wOw partners who are conservatives, worried about having to pay more taxes. For this they are willing to shut their eyes to the antideluvian (and I believe, immoral) beliefs of the Republican Party. I violently disagree with them. If they think I’m a little to the left of Trotsky, I think they are a little to the right of Franco, Mussolini and that German guy.      

But through the years I’ve managed to be friends with William F. Buckley Jr., Roy Cohn, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Taki Theodoracopulos, Rudy Giuliani, Pat Buchanan and to have a civil dialogue with them. I suppose old-fashioned manners and differences of opinion die hard.

OK, sweetie pies, go crazy for all I care. March on the Palin headquarters with flaming torches. I don’t want her to win anymore than most of you seem to. I honestly feel as if I will perish if I have to live through an administration in which she is there, stealing all the thunder from her own president. And being written of as a glamorous maverick for four years. (No matter how the media may hate her, they will eat her up and lick their chops if she continues as a public figure.) Or if I have to live through seeing the Supreme Court add just one more conservative Justice which will be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

I was just saying that we might back off a bit from hysteria before we go to vote. Sometimes violent diatribes backfire and if the Democrats are as crazed by Sarah Palin as they seem to be, this may embolden Republicans and those who haven’t yet decided to go for her as a rebuke to overkill.

I would say if you want to read a reasoned response, again, you should go to Newsweek for September 15th and just take a look at Anna Qindlin’s reasoning under the headline “Can You Say ‘Sexist’?: If you’re a Republican, you’d better learn. The right wing that trashed the women’s movement suddenly finds its inner feminist.”

I used to like John McCain. But he lost me when that woman in his audience asked: “How do we beat the bitch?” (referring to Hillary Clinton) and he responded of his friend and colleague in the Senate: “Excellent question.”        

So, OK, I thought Sarah Palin was an appalling choice. I was just overtaken by my Miss Manners training when I suggested we might damp it down a bit. We have 60 days to work to change things. My only wish is that Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential choice. When Hillary debated Sarah, nobody could accuse either one of them of being unfair or sexist.  

But if wishes were horses we all could ride. Now I am just going to cool my jets, unbuckle my saddle and take off my spurs. Somebody spurt some cool water on my head. 

Click here on this text to read my New York Post column.