Looking back at and with Molly Ivins (including her terrible times at the NY Times)

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

"I know what kind of governor [George W. Bush] has been -- if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk."

"We are pleased to announce the reelection of Senator Drew Nixon of Carthage. Nixon is the fellow who was found by Dallas police in a car with not one but three prostitutes. He explained he thought they were asking for directions."

-- "Mollyisms" from Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation

by Ken

As I mentioned recently, I ordered the paperback (as opposed to e-book) editions of a pair of anthologies published by The Nation in its varied book series, volumes dedicated to the great Texas-born and -bred journalist Molly Ivins (1944-2007) and the great American novelist and political commentator Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), both edited by a former executive editor of the magazine, Richard Lingeman, who was in harness when they were contributing to it.

They're smaller books than I was imagining, but none the worse for it -- we get to savor the contents more fully. The Vonnegut volume is gently and wittily cataclysmic, and I definitely plan to come back to it. I thought I'd start, though, with Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation."


"MOLLYISMS" (1):
THREE LONE STAR GOVERNORS

Editor Lingeman has a starter section called "Mollyisms: Is Texas America or Vice Versa?" From this section I've taken the liberty of extracting a bunch of the Mollyisms and grouping them thematically.

It seems natural to start with an unholy trinity of Texas governors.

Bill Clements (governor, 1979-83 and 1987-91)

"Our only Governor, Sweet William we call him, might be described as irascible. Actually, he's mean, bad-tempered and has a face that would sour milk. . . . Turns out the man lies like a skunk puts out stink. He couldn't change his mind without looking like a sackful of fishhooks. . . . Lots of politicians paint themselves into corners by making stupid campaign promises. Bill Clements is one of the few to ever survey the situation and apply a second coat."

"Clemens said he knows the NCAA has a hard task and he 'commensurates' with 'em and he hopes they 'secede.' "

"As our former Governor Bill Clements said during an etiquette lesson preceding the visit of Deng Xiaoping of China to Houston, 'We have to be nice to this little fella and remember we all like chop suey.' "

George W. Bush (governor, 1995-2000)

"One of the funnier slogans, from George W. Bush's last run for governor, was 'end social promotion.' Social promotion is the story of Bush's life."

"Hearing [GWB] has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials. Will the man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive?"

And as president --

"The fact is that unless someone else writes a speech for him, the President of the United States sounds like a borderline moron. But the media sit around pretending that he can actually talk -- can convince, inspire and lead us."

GWB's Texas successor, "Governor Goodhair" (2000-15)

"Bush was replaced by his exceedingly Lite Guv Rick Perry, who has really good hair."

MOLLY'S "CAREER" AS A TV CRITIC,
AND THE UNPLANNED TURN IT TOOK

Lingeman raises the question of how Molly came to write for The Nation.

The short answer is because the magazine's former editor, Victor Navasky, asked her. Originally, he planned to sign her up as the magazine's television critic, a post we were always trying to fill without success and one that would presumably elicit her wit with minimal demands on her time. [This "Victor Navasky" would be the same person known to us via Calvin Trillin as "the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky," the man who, as we've noted, got Trillin to write a column for The Nation for a fee "in the high two figures." -- Ed.]

Here is Victor's account of her hiring interview. The next time Molly was in New York, he invited her to dinner at Orso's, an "in" dining spot in the theater district popular with stage folk and first-nighters. Upon her arrival at the restaurant, Victor did a double take. She was dressed in an evening gown and a fur coat. On her six-foot frame that rig would have looked statuesque to say the least. Maybe this was her way of spoofing the idea of a good ol' gal from Texas trying to make a big impression in the Big City.

After Victor opened the negotiations, she confessed that she didn't own a television set. Victor apparently was not daunted by her lack of experience as a TV critic, indeed as a TV watcher. For she had the one essential qualification for the job: a built-in bullshit detector, fine-tuned on the bloviations of some of the windiest politicians on the Great Plains. And so he offered to buy her one and she signed on.

Time passed, and you know what? She never wrote a damn thing about television.

Instead, she did something better. She started contributing what might be described as Letters from Texas, bringing to the magazine's East and West Coast-concentrated readership the latest political developments in the Great State, which seemed to be full of exotic people known as the Gibber, Governor Goodhair and the Breck Girl ["House Speaker Gib Lewis, Governor Rick Perry, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, respectively"]. . . .

"MOLLYISMS" (2):
A MENAGERIE OF POLS, TEXAN AND OTHERWISE

More Mollyisms, branching out to other Lone Star political life forms, and beyond.

"The bill to make English the Official State Language came to naught, which is just as well, since we'd have had to deport the entire state leadership if it was passed."

"Former Congressman Tom Loeffler [from the 21st Congressional District, 1979-87, before losing to Bill Clements in the Republican gubernatorial primary] is now the Reagan Administration's new point man . . . for lobbying on aid to the contras. Loeffler . . . is the guy who thinks you can get AIDS through your feet, as we learned when he wore shower caps on his while on a trip to San Francisco, lest he acquire the disease from the bathroom tile."

"Jim Collins [U.S. representative from Texas's 3rd Congressional District, 1968-83] is the man who once moved me, in the days when I wrote for the Dallas Times Herald, to observe, 'If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.' "

With some special love for a pair of Pats --

"Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech [at the Republican National Convention]; it probably sounded better in the original German. No one could decide whether Phil Gramm or Pat Robertson made the worst speech of the convention, perhaps because no one listened to them."

"In trying to determine just how far to the right the GOP's loony wing will go, it's worth noting how Pat Robertson, past and possibly future GOP presidential candidate, is fighting Iowa's proposed equal rights amendment. Pat says feminism 'encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.' "

MOLLY'S SHORT, UNHAPPY CAREER AT THE
NY TIMES -- OR, LIFE UNDER ABE ROSENTHAL

You'd think this would have been a good thing, Molly being hired by the New York Times, but somehow it didn't work out the way one would have hoped. Lingeman clues us in to some of what that "somehow" was, and how unhappy a time it was for Molly. It seems to have had more than a little to do with Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal, who -- as anyone knows who's read or heard much about his career -- had a lot of screwy ideas about journalism which he upheld as if they were journalistic holy writ, quite apart from being a raging sociopath who managed to carry around more chips than you could fit on a dozen shoulders. To me it says a lot about him that he had this awesome talent on his payroll and managed to get less out of her than you would imagine possible.

In 1976, the New York Times beckoned to her as part of a feminization drive at the newspaper. There also seemed to have been some hope that her humor-brightened reportage would liven up the Gray Lady of West Forty-third Street.

As it turned out, her career with the Times was not a happy one, though she started off covering big stories like the Son of Sam murders. But she didn't really fit in. Maybe that all started when she showed up in the newsroom wearing jeans and trailed by her dog, Shit. The story goes that when she was serving as Rocky Mountain bureau chief in Denver (comprising a staff of one), she filed a story about the annual chicken slaughter in Corrales, New Mexico, which she referred to as a "gang pluck." The Times's executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who hated what he deemed to be wise-ass reporters who fooled with the news or snuck in double entendres, called her into his office and confronted her.

"Molly," he said, getting right down to the obvious, "you are going to make readers think of a gang fuck."

"Abe," she replied, "you're a hard man to fool."

He consigned her to purgatory -- covering City Hall -- which left her little to do. Eventually she resigned. "Abe was a hard man to fool," she commented.

A psychiatrist might guess that her double entendre was a subconscious protest. She had been unhappy at the way Times editors declawed her prose and dampened her humor. "Naturally, I was miserable -- at five times my previous salary," she later said of that period. "The New York Times is a great newspaper; it is also No Fun."

Lingeman points out that Molly's return to Texas proved "a great career move" -- she became a columnist first for the Dallas Times Herald, then for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and, nationally, Creators Syndicate. It was a terrible thing, though, for the NYT, its readers, and the country, that the Times editorial command didn't know how to make this treasure a jewel in its journalistic crown.


NEXT WEEK (I'M THINKING): KURT VONNEGUT

As the great literary critic, commentator, and editor John Leonard can be read observing in Vonnegut by the Dozen: "Like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, even when he's funny Kurt Vonnegut is depressed." He was a great novelist, and in his own distinctive way as great and cataclysmic a political observer, and perhaps even more distressing.

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Missing Molly; or, How The Nation got me to buy a book -- actually two

For $9.99 you can get Molly as a PDF or ePub download, or for $11.99 plus shipping you can get the book Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation as an actual paperback book. I decided I wanted Molly preserved between the covers of an actual book, and Kurt Vonnegut too.


"As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office."

-- Molly Ivins (of course)

by Ken

Maybe it was post-election-season blues, but the marketers at The Nation punched a hole right through my normal "I've got too much stuff and way too much stuff to read" defenses by sending out another e-announce of the publication of Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation, a collection of stuff she wrote for the magazine over the period 1982-2007. "Dear Friend of the Nation," the pitch began,

MOLLY IVINS: Letters to The Nation, a collection of articles by the esteemed Texas journalist and gadfly who graced our pages for twenty-five years, is available in paperback and in digital format for tablets, smartphones and computers.

Writing in her native "Texlish," Ivins planted herself squarely in the tradition of American vernacular humor, which includes such writers as Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Ring Lardner. The Nation was the grateful beneficiary of her mordant wit, as you'll see in this collection of consistently sharp and funny pieces from 1982 to 2007 covering political developments in the great state of Texas, and featuring exotic and idiosyncratic characters like "The Gibber," "The Breck Girl" and "Governor Goodhair."

Ivins also wrote highly literate essays and book reviews such as "Ezra Pound in East Texas," included in this collection. The book's editor, Richard Lingeman, advises readers to prepare to "laugh out loud" (and often) at MOLLY IVINS: Letters to The Nation.

Best of all, by purchasing e-books through eBookNation, you'll help to sustain The Nation's journalism while supporting our writers and progressive ideals.

I'm sure I read a bunch of Molly's Nation pieces when they were first published, but I'll be happy to read them again, and of course to fill in those I somehow didn't read.

That word "happy" is important -- no, crucial. Because among the great writers I've read, Molly belonged to the special company of those whose writing always made me happy. And she never did it by ducking the tough subjects. She just had a gift for looking stupidity and evil squarely in the eye and making them entertaining without diminishing their horribleness. Usually you came away understanding that horribleness much better than you did at other writers' hands.

If ever there was a time when we needed a Molly Ivins, it's now. Unfortunately, there was only one, and she's gone. And if ever there was a time when I'm missing Molly, it's now. As it happens, though, most of the stuff she wrote in her enormously prolific career for a profusion of publications, even when anthologized in book form, was never read by anywhere near the number of people who should have read it, and would have benefited richly from reading it. I'm thinking that a healthy dose of recycled Molly is going to tell us more about our current political world than spanking-new just-about-anybody-else.

At the same time, I recalled that there were some earlier Nation book anthologies I'd been meaning to get hold of, and a glance reminded me that at the top of the list was Vonnegut by the Dozen: Twelve Pieces by Kurt Vonnegut, from the period 1978-98. Same deal: Some of those pieces I know I've read but would happily reread, and then there are bound to be pieces I haven't read. And my recollection of Kurt V's political writings is that they tended to be mind-blowing.

Give the folks at The Nation credit for realizing that their archives contain material of this quality. (I might also mention the collection Gore Vidal's State of the Nation: Nation Essays 1958-2005. I should also mention that the Ivins, Vonnegut, and Vidal volumes are all edited by Richard Lingeman.)

For a lot of writers of the Unapologetic Left, The Nation was about as hospitable place to publish as they were going to find for things they really wanted to say in print -- and at The Nation's pay scale you can be sure they weren't doing it for the money. Calvin Trillin has written often enough about his, er, "negotiations" with the magazine's then-editor and publisher, "the wily and parsimonious" Victor S. Navasky, when he began writing a regular column for The Nation. Trillin had a long history with the wily and parsimonious Victor N, and so wasn't entirely surprised when the aforementioned negotiations began and ended with the quoting of an amount "in the high two figures."

For the full range of eBookNation offerings, go here.

Meanwhile, here's a grab bag of Molly-isms, courtesy of Wikipedia (lots of links as well as sources onsite):

On the subject of Pat Buchanan's famously combative Culture War Speech at the 1992 Republican Convention, which attracted controversy over Buchanan's aggressive rhetoric against Bill Clinton, liberals, supporters of reproductive and gay rights, and for his comparison of American politics to religious warfare, Ivins famously quipped that the speech had "probably sounded better in the original German," noting the similarity between the concept of "culture war" and the Kulturkampf of Otto von Bismarck's Germany.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war...We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!' " (from her last column)

"Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.

"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."—quoted by John Nichols for The Nation (Original source: "The Fun's in the Fight," column for Mother Jones, 1993)

On Bill Clinton: "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal." (Introduction to You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You)

On James M. Collins, U.S. Representative, R-Dallas: "If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day." Collins had said that the current energy crisis could be averted if "...we didn't use all that gas on school busing..." Ivins' quote engendered substantial controversy, with calls and letters pouring into her newspaper, The Dallas Times Herald. The newspaper turned the controversy into a publicity campaign, with billboards all over the city asking, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"—which she later employed as the title for her first book.

On George W. Bush, she likened him to a post turtle.

"Of Bush's credentials as an economic conservative, there is no question at all—he owes his political life to big corporate money; he's a CEO's wet dream. He carries their water, he's stumpbroke—however you put it, George W. Bush is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America. ... We can find no evidence that it has ever occurred to him to question whether it is wise to do what big business wants.

"As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office."

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Republicans Handed The DCCC An Attack Against Overtime On A Silver Platter... Will Steve Israel Screw Up The Politics?

Ros-Lehtinen (l), sitting in a blue district, had no fear of voting to end overtime pay because she knows Wasserman Schultz (r) will rescue her career once again

Wednesday Cantor and Boehner finally managed to pass a bill to kill overtime pay for workers, something Republicans have been trying to do since the Fair Labor Standards Act first passed in 1938. (Conservatives had kept it off the books from 1932-1938 after it was written by champion of working families, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama.) This week, Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) tried to ameliorate the impact of the Republican bill with a motion that was meant to prevent employers denying "the use of compensatory time for the following purposes: (1) to attend medical appointments; (2) to care for a sick family member or if the employee is sick; or (3) to attend counseling or rehabilitation appointments for injuries sustained by the employee as a member of the Armed Forces. The motion would also prohibit employers who have been found to violate the Equal Pay Act of 1963 from replacing monetary overtime with compensatory time." Every Republican except Walter Jones (NC) voted against it. And every Democrat-- even the 3 Blue Dogs who supported Boehner's and Cantor's antiworker crusade to screw with overtime pay, Matheson, Cuellar and Peterson-- voted for it. Shea-Porter's motion failed 200-227.

The so-called "Working Families Flexibility Act" that they got Alabama muppet Martha Roby to carry this week, failed in 1996, 1997 and 2003. In 1996 it passed the Republican-controlled House 225-195. This, obviously, was pre-Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010, so there were 14 Democrats voting for it then (unlike 3 this week). Except for Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), who voted for it again Wednesday, none of the Democrats who crossed the aisle to join the GOP anti-worker movement are still in Congress. They've all either joined the GOP permanently, been defeated, retired, died or moved over to K Street to make it rich as a criminal lobbyist. Of the 19 Republicans who voted against it in 1996, only a few are still in Congress: Peter King (NY), who voted for it this week and, shockingly, Steve Stockman (TX) before he got involved with blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal building, voted no then but was an emphatic yes vote Wednesday; and then there were Chris Smith (NJ) and Don Young (AK), still voting no. Frank LoBiondo (NJ) was in a redder seat in 1996 and voted for it; he voted against it Wednesday. The Senate killed it.

In 1997 they brought it back as their top priority, H.R. 1 and it passed again and was again killed by the Senate. At the time Newsday reported that:

When Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) was being courted by the House leadership to support the flextime measure, he asked the assembled bigwigs if any of them had spoken to labor-- the representatives of millions of those workers the bill is supposed to help. “It was as if I had said, Have you met with somebody from Mars?’” said King, who along with Rep. Michael Forbes (R-Quogue) bucked their party to vote against the measure.

When they next tried, in 2003. the Senate thwarted them again. At the time Molly Ivins wrote "To hear the Republicans tell it, you’d think these were family-friendly bills, something like Clinton’s Family Leave Act, designed to help you balance the difficult combined demands of work and family. With such a smarm of butter over their visages do the Republicans go on about the joys of “flexibility” and “freedom of choice” that you would have to read the bills for maybe 30 seconds before figuring out they’re about repealing the 40-hour workweek and ending overtime.”

Wednesday there were 8 Republicans who voted with the Democrats, three from New Jersey, Jon Runyan, Frank LoBiondo and Chris Smith; two from New York, Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm and Richard Hanna; and one each from Pennsylvania (Pat Meehan), Ohio (David Joyce) and Alaska (Don Young). No Confederates or far right extremists. Several of them are being targeted by the DCCC and are very nervous about being perceived as too right-wing by the independents in their districts who will determine their fates. Obama won some of their districts; Romney didn't perform especially well anywhere except in Alaska. These are the eight districts with the Obama-Romney results from November:

• NJ-02 (LoBiondo)- 53.5- 45.4%
• NJ-03 (Runyan)- 51.8- 47.2%
• NJ-04 (Smith)- 44.7- 54.2%
• NY-11 (Grimm)- 51.6- 47.3%
• NY-22 (Hanna)- 48.8- 49.2%
• OH-14 (Joyce)- 47.6- 50.9%
• PA-07 (Meehan)- 48.5- 50.4%
• AK-AL (Young)- 41.2- 55.3%

The dozen Republicans who voted to take away overtime pay who are most likely to suffer at the polls in 2014 are in districts where Obama won: John Kline (MN), Scott Rigel (VA), Erik Paulsen (MN), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), presuming Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel don't sabotage whichever Democrat runs against her, Bill Young (FL), Jeff Denham (CA), Gary Miller (CA), David Valadao (CA), Chris Gibson (NY), Mike Coffman (CO), Joe Heck (NV), and Tom Latham (IA). Actually all of that presupposes a competent DCCC, which we don't have... so forget those 12 seats. The DCCC even seems to be screwing up the Gary Miller race again, where Obama beat Romney 57-41% and there was no Democrat on the ballot because of DCCC incompetence. And they seem to be falling into the exact same trap again this year. Like I've been warning; the Democrats will never win back the House with Steve Israel as DCCC Chairman. "Reptilian" or not, he just does not have what it takes to win.

Considering that reactionary, anti-worker Blue Dog Jim Matheson (UT) is still on their Frontline list-- and likely to get as much as $2,000,000 from the DCCC this cycle-- it's lucky no one at that organization has any sense of irony or they might not have sent this video out yesterday: