Missing Molly Ivins

Of all the people in the world--outside my family of course--that I would wish death on, about the last would be Molly Ivins. Why did she have to leave us now, when we need her insightful iconoclasm most?

BuzzFlash has a couple of interviews with Ms. Ivins posted on its site. I copied these paragraphs to remember what she held important:

And what is interesting to me is how successful people like Limbaugh have been in telling people who really are getting screwed, I mean, it’s not fair, they don’t have equal opportunities, there is a whole lot that has happened that has made their lives less comfortable, less pleasant, less bearable, narrower and uglier. And that is true for a lot of Americans. And they sense it but they do not know who to get mad at.

So, they listen to guys like Limbaugh who tell them the reason everything is going to hell is because of a bunch of pointy-headed professors on college campuses and political correctness and feminists and all these people. Let me tell you something: college professors and politically correct liberals and feminists by and large don’t run those huge corporations that lay off 10,000 people at a time. They are not in charge of companies that move so many jobs overseas. They don’t run the S&Ls and the big Financial Institutions that screw people over. And it seems to me that this misdirection of anger is a terrible waste of perfectly good anger.

Absolutely. It has been my contention for decades that the Ku Klux Klan went after the wrong bunch. They picked on their fellow victims rather than their true oppressors.

We were standing in line to vote in the 2004 election, and the man in front of me said, "I'm more scared of the liberals than I am of the terrorists." I have often wished I had countered with, "Well, I'm more scared of people who use words like 'liberal' as a substitute for thinking."

But now I wish I had read this interview with Molly Ivins before that so I could have said, instead, "Why? The liberals didn't shut down the Broyhill plants and lay off those thousands of workers. It wasn't the liberals who push credit cards on people and then charge outrageous interest." Well, I could go on, but that is enough to make my point.

Now, I wish Molly Ivins were here to comment in her inimitable way about the contrast between Hugo Chavez in Venezuela getting his congress to give him dictatorial powers while George W. Bush arrogates those powers unto himself with the consent of a lapdog Republican Congress. I pray the Democrats now develop the backbone to challenge this unconstitutional outrage.

I love the refrigerator magnet I saw for sale at BuzzFlash: "Will somebody PLEASE give Bush a blow job so we can start the impeachment?"