Ivins poked the powerful, right or left, in ways that made us understand she was on our side. She wasn't willing to abide foolishness by either party or its practitioners. In a world where vitriol passes for punditry, where political discourse has been reduced to gainsaying or to taunts of evil, stupid or venal, Molly will be missed.
Zurcher:
Goodbye, Molly I.
Molly Ivins is gone, and her words will never grace these pages again --
for this, we will mourn. But Molly wasn't the type of woman who would want us to
grieve. More likely, she'd say something like, "Hang in there, keep fightin' for
freedom, raise more hell, and don't forget to laugh, too."
If there was one thing Molly wanted us to understand, it's that the
world of politics is absurd. Since we can't cry, we might as well laugh. And in
case we ever forgot, Molly would remind us, several times a week, in her own
unique style.
Shortly after becoming editor of Molly Ivins' syndicated column, I
learned one of my most important jobs was to tell her newspaper clients that,
yes, Molly meant to write it that way. We called her linguistic peculiarities
"Molly-isms." Administration officials were "Bushies," government was in fact
spelled "guvment," business was "bidness." And if someone was "madder than a
peach orchard boar," well, he was quite mad indeed.
Of course, having grown up in Texas, all of this made sense to me. But
to newspaper editors in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and beyond -- Yankee land, as
Molly would say -- her folksy language could be a mystery. "That's just Molly
being Molly," I would explain and leave it at that.
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