Count Me In, Mollster: No Hillary In 2008!

Don't get me wrong. I won't support the Dumbo candidate to succeed Dub in 2008, either. However, The Mollster is a national treasure. She won my heart in 1985. She was invited to speak at the Collegium Excellens as a Distinguished Lecturer. After an innocuous talk (It was Amarillo, for goodness sake!), she took questions from the audience. Poppy had succeeded Dutch and his most controversial Cabinet appointee was Former Senator John Tower (R-TX) as Secretary of Defense. Tower later withdrew, but someone in the audience asked The Mollster for her opinion of the then-ongoing Tower fracas. The Mollster drawled into the microphone, "I don't really care for John Tower, but I'll tell you this much: Tower drunk on his ass (Crapulence was the rap against Tower.) makes more sense than Ronald Reagan ever made when he was stone sober." Gasps from all around the Concert Hall-Theater. The next morn, outraged Dumbos from all over the Texas Panhandle bombarded the Collegium's prexy with demands that he decapitate whomever had invited that woman to speak on campus and defame the greatest president of the 20th century, yada yada yada. I was never prouder of the Collegium Excellens than I was when The Mollster told it like it was. If this is (fair & balanced) truthiness, so be it.

[x Creator's Syndicate]
It's time for Democrats to put up or shut up
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas --- I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy -- rough, tough Bobby Kennedy -- didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?

Here's a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, "There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008."

This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by "a string of bad new from the Middle East ... into calling for premature retreat from Iraq," versus those pragmatic folk like Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emmanuel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman.

Oh come on, people -- get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war -- from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.

You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine you have no idea what people are thinking. I'm telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven't got enough sense to OWN the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.

Do it all, go long, go for public campaign financing for Congress. I'm serious as a stroke about this -- that is the only reform that will work, and you know it, as well as everyone else who's ever studied this. Do all the goo-goo stuff everybody has made fun of all these years: embrace redistricting reform, electoral reform, House rules changes, the whole package. Put up, or shut up. Own this issue, or let Jack Abramoff politics continue to run your town.

Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were "German dogs." They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The MINUTE someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Rep. John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless "string of bad news."

Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can't get up and fight, we'll find someone who can.

Molly Ivins is a nationally syndicated political columnist who remains cheerful despite Texas politics. She emphasizes the more hilarious aspects of both state and national government, and consequently never has to write fiction.

Ivins is from Houston, Texas, graduated from Smith College in 1966, attended Columbia University's School of Journalism and studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was at the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, where she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings. She went on to the Minneapolis Tribune and was the first woman police reporter in that city. In the late 1960s, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change," covering angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.

Ivins returned to Texas as co-editor of the Texas Observer, a sprightly, muckraking publication devoted to coverage of Texas politics and social issues. She roamed the state in search of truth, justice and good stories. In 1976, Ivins joined The New York Times, first as a political reporter in New York City and Albany; she was then named Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, chiefly because there was no one else in the bureau. For three years she covered nine mountain states by herself, and was often tired.

In 1982, she returned to Texas as a columnist for the late Dallas Times-Herald, and after its much-lamented demise, she spent the next nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She became an independent journalist in 2001 writing her column for Creators Syndicate. Also in 2001 she won the William Allen White Award from the University of Kansas, the Smith Medal from Smith College and was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the 2003 recipient of the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service; also in 2003, she received the Pringle Prize for Washington Journalism from Columbia University and the Eugene V. Debs Award in the field of journalism. In 2004, she received the David Brower Award for journalism from the Sierra Club.

Her freelance work has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, TV Guide, and many less-worthy publications when she desperately needed the money -- of which the most memorable was something called Playgirl. She is also known for her essays on National Public Radio as well as media appearances around the world. Ivins has written six best-selling books, the most recent being, BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America, in 2003 and WHO LET THE DOGS IN? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known, in 2004.

Ivins is active in the American Civil Liberties Union and often writes about First Amendment issues. She donates a speech every month to the First Amendment. She became one of the world's Leading Authorities on George W. Bush entirely by accident. She has known him since they were in high school, and as Sir Edmund Hillary said of Mount Everest -- he was there.

Ivins counts as her highest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her, and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.


COPYRIGHT © 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.