:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.02.2007 ::

:: "Remembering Molly Ivins" :

John Nichols

The Guardian UK

Tony Blair has long been the favourite international leader of a Texan named George Bush. But not all Texans have shared the sentiment. Indeed, the US is in mourning over the passing of a Texan who thought the British prime minister a bit too willing to play the poodle in his relationship with the American president.

Molly Ivins, the wisecracking veteran journalist from the Lone Star State and the most widely-circulated liberal columnist in the United States, succumbed Wednesday evening at age 62 to what she referred to as "a scorching case of cancer". That cancer silenced the Bush administration's sharpest critic at precisely the moment when the rest of the US media is finally rising from bended knee to challenge the president. It also removed from the American discourse one of the few popular commentators who regularly reported on - and frequently reported from - Britain.

Ivins, a small "r" republican, took her shots at regal Brits, just as she did regal Americans, in a column that appeared in almost 400 newspapers several times a week. But she was, like most American liberals, a bit of an anglophile. And she let it be known that she expected an Oxford-educated prime minister, especially one from the Labour Party, to give foreign policy cues to the untraveled and incurious president she anointed Shrub.

She would be disappointed. Aghast at the British leader's inexplicable willingness to go along with Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, Ivins labeled him "Tony Blair, the first casualty of the war". And as the full folly of that war became evident, and as Blair continued to follow Bush's march into the quagmire, Ivins took to teasing the isolated leaders as "the Axis of Feeble".

Ivins had expected more from Blair, who she assumed would recognize his American friend's frailties, even if the prime minister might have had a hard time comprehending what she referred to as her fellow Texan's "eccentric grasp of English". Reporting on the first 100 days of Bush's presidency, the columnist ticked off a long list of missteps and misdeeds - "gratuitously went out of his way to pronounce the Kyoto treaty dead," "needlessly and uselessly enraged the Chinese through ignorance of Taiwan policy" - and then noted: "On the plus side, after his first meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, Bush said, 'we both use Colgate toothpaste.' The Brits spent weeks trying to decipher the meaning of that remark."

When Bush finally began meeting with foreign leaders, Ivins informed her readers that there was "a joke making the rounds in Europe: Bush, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac are holding an economic summit. While Chirac maunders on about something, Bush leans over and says to Blair, 'The trouble with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.'" At the time, she assumed that Blair would gently set the president straight on such matters. Eventually, however, the caustic commentator came to the conclusion that the prime minister was aiding and abetting the president.

A respected journalist who worked for many years as a New York Times bureau chief - finally writing her way out of the job when she referred to a "community chicken-killing festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck" - Ivins wrote columns that drew on the absurdities of politics in her native Texas. And when the most absurd Texan of all became president, she found that tens of millions of Americans wanted her take on the new commander-in-chief. She did so in the form of what remains the best biography of the president: Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W Bush (written with her friend Lou Dubose). She could have settled into an easy career of Bush bashing. Instead, frustrated by the a White House press corps that she said was characterized by "no principle, no guts, no grace", Ivins kept investigating and reporting - often, in the months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, providing the only skeptical assessment of the president to appear in newspapers across the country.

Ivins traveled to Britain to find fodder for her columns, and she was the first prominent US journalist to write extensively and aggressively about the so-called Downing Street Memo. "I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post, the Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It's my job," she informed readers. "But when I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. I could not believe what I was reading."

To her, the evidence of collusion between the Bush administration and Blair's aides to assure that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of attacking Iraq was "the smoking gun" and she wrote the hell out of the story in a series of columns. For many Americans, living in communities where their local media reported little or nothing about the memo, Ivins's columns were revelations. As she noted, "The memo was a huge story in Britain, but is almost unreported here."

"I don't know if these memos represent an impeachable offense," she wrote. "But they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Heck, I'd settle for that again, over what we're looking at now."

Read more here.

A L S O

A voice liberal with wit, passion
Austin American-Statesman

President Bush: Molly Ivins Will Be Missed
Playfuls.com

posted by me

Labels: "Molly Ivins"

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