Molly Ivins

"I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton."read more

The pure joy of the whole Karl Rove/Valerie Plame affair is in watching the massive Republican spin-control machine in operation. Here’s Rove, who has famously gone after his political enemies over the years on behalf of any candidate he has ever been hired to represent, now unleashing his entire spin operation, perfected over five years in the White House, on behalf of . . . himself. It’s just so interesting to watch it work.read more

May 2005

Hey, the sun is shining, the bluebonnets are out, our big music festival, South by Southwest, rocked, and the puppy wants to play. You expect me to write about Terri Schiavo, Iraq, and Paul ("There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq") Wolfowitz? Instead, let us celebrate spring with a roundup of the President's verbal gaffes, boners, grammatical errors, and immortal contributions to logic. Remember, this is a contest between George Bush pére and George Bush fils, with the old man still well ahead at this point, though I think you will agree, after reading the latest, that our boy is gaining on him.read more

November 2004

Time to settle down and drive hard for the finish, progressives. Or as they say at Harvard, fight fiercely. We are into the phase of the campaign when it's just straight-up, old-fashioned get out the vote. Ground war is what the pros call it, as opposed to the air war of television ads.read more

May 2004

The Progressive's ninety-fifth anniversary--what a lovely reason to celebrate. This calls for whoopin' and hollerin', shootin' out the lights, dancin' on the bar, and paintin' the front porch red. I realize the Midwestern progressives who run the venerable rag are more apt to hold a somber symposium on the erosion of our constitutional rights by way of a wing-ding, but you can't expect a Texan not to pounce on such a splendid excuse to hallelujah the county.read more

March 2004

Gosh, it was good to hear from President Bush's alternative universe in the State of the Union address. "Jobs are on the rise." As we say in Texas, "No shit?" At the December rate of 1,000 new jobs a month, it would take 166 years just to replace the two million jobs lost since Bush became President, and that, of course, would be 166 years of not creating enough jobs for new workers. Or as John Kerry puts it, that leaves us only 249,000 jobs a month short of where we need to be and where, incidentally, the President promised we would be by now.read more

February 2004

I was puzzled in 2000 when so few in the press seemed interested in George W. Bush's record, and now I find there's mass amnesia on the subject again this year. For example, a number of conservative pundits--including Bill Safire in highest dudgeon--have opined about Howard Dean's attempt to sequester his gubernatorial papers. George W. Bush, however, did not unseal his gubernatorial papers, which he had carted off to his father's Presidential library at Texas A&M. Texas gubernatorial papers are public by law and normally go to the state archivist. Bush did not change his mind until the Texas attorney general made him do so last summer. (Hint to those in search of media bias: Who got more coverage for secreting gubernatorial papers, Bush or Dean?)read more

August 2003

What ho, sports fans? Has this been a dandy spell for mind-boggling government, or what? Still no weapons of mass destruction, and every neocon in America is creating elaborate rationales for why it makes no difference whatever if we were lied to about this war. Meanwhile, in a truly creative demonstration of their problem-solving abilities, White House staffers fixed the entire global warming problem by editing it out of a report on the environment. Way to go, team! Why pay attention to scientists when you can insert a study paid for by the American Petroleum Institute instead? That Karl Rove, just brilliant. As President Bush said on June 4, "I'm the master of low expectations." And he continues to prove it.read more

June 2003

So much competition for the hotly contested title "What Were They Thinking?" this month that, as the kids say, "Shut up!" The number of bonehead plays was so astronomical, one is inclined to wonder if there's anyone left around here with a lick of common sense.read more

February 2003

So far, it's not shaping up as a glorious year. We really are heading in the wrong direction here, with damn few people pointing it out with any clarity. The justification for war against Iraq was obscure to begin with--Saddam Hussein may be an evil son of a bitch, but he never had no truck with Al Qaeda--and now looks absolutely ludicrous given the situation in North Korea, a country run by a really evil son of a bitch who does have weapons of mass destruction and is threatening to use them. So of course we're not even thinking about preemptive war there. You know what? We look like complete dipshits. I hate to mention it, but the rest of the world thinks we're out of our tiny minds.read more

February 2003

Besides, the Republicans have already made a colossal error. Or two. In the course of turning the Homeland Security bill from a thirty-five-page rearrange-the-bureaucracy plan into a 484-page "mon-stros-ity," as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia kept calling it, the R's went one special interest too far. They took out "the Wellstone amendment," introduced by the late, great populist Senator, that would have barred corporations that move to offshore tax shelters like Bermuda from getting federal government contracts related to homeland security. The technical terms for these tax dodges are "corporate inversion" and "corporate expatriation." But they're tax dodges, pure and simple. The U.S. Treasury estimates we lose $70 to $155 billion each year from American corporations taking advantage of offshore tax shelters.read more

December 2002

What a campaign! Jesse Ventura took offense at someone else's manners? Mr. Etiquette, the Sensitive Male. Poor Charlton Heston, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, no shame to him, was trotted around the country and held up by both arms while he urged us to get more guns. Both candidates for governor in California were capable of causing tooth decay in anyone forced to listen to them. In Texas, our governor merely accused his opponent of being a drug dealer and murderer. Slime and negativity from coast to coast.read more

April 2002

A win for our side! The White House ix-nayed the proposed "Office of Strategic Influence" in the Pentagon. That was the lovely notion of having an office of pro-American propaganda, which would spread stories both true and untrue. After all, the Pentagon guys whined, the Taliban told Afghans those nice ready-meals we sent were poisoned, so why couldn't we make up some story about them? Nobody liked the idea, the White House disowned it entirely, and everybody involved now claims they never, never meant to tell a lie.read more

March 2002

Admit it, you're wallowing in Enron. Aside from the fact that it wrecked a bunch of people's lives, it is a beautiful scandal. Naturally, there is a special Texas element of looniness. Our governor, Rick (Goodhair) Perry, appointed an Enron executive to the state's Public Utilities Commission last summer, the better to regulate energy companies. The very next day, Perry got a $25,000 contribution from Ken Lay, which would have raised questions except Gov. Perry cleared up the whole matter by explaining the contribution was "totally coincidental." This news relieved everybody and gave the governor a new nickname, Old Coincidence. read more

November 2001

I was in Paris for all of September. After the 11th, at the American Church on the Left Bank and the American Cathedral on the Right, the steps were covered with the most beautiful flowers and the most touching messages. They ranged from "God Bless America" to "Nous Vous Aimons" to "Vive Les New Yorkers." Many of the messages mentioned '44, Normandy, or the liberation of Paris. One, in a shaky, spidery hand, referred to the famous American declaration of World War I: "Lafayette, we are here," and added the assurance that the French would be with America once more.read more