From:
        Martin Heesacker <[log in to unmask]>

Mon 5:04 PM


I read in a recent column of hers that Molly has breast cancer. Keep a good
thought for
her. Wish I had kept the column. It was masterful in its understated honesty and
clear in
its message: get a mammogram and/or encourage others to do so.

Marty Heesacker

Norman Holland wrote:

> This is the sublime Molly Ivins on the current presidential
> campaign.                          --Best, Norm
>
> Molly Ivins Column
>
> Headline: Lost art of political babble
>
> Austin, Texas, January 21, 2000
>
> You may think a person would bring up the
> subject of political rhetoric in our day only to
> dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble
> of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln and
> Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.
>
>         What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory
> years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be
> forever revered for setting new standards in political language.
>
>         My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is
> rapidly developing a style that May yet become comparable to his father's. He is
> a master of the perfectly, opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan's
> famous line in the 1980 campaign - "There you go again!" - was carefully
> scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech
> writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer.
>
>  Examples:
>
>   "Whatever's fair."
>
>   "Whatever's right."
>
>   "I'm all right on that."
>
>   "Whatever is fair between the parties."
>
> And, a recent gem of opacity:
>
>   "I will take a balanced approach on the environment."
>
>         That last one was Bush's death-defying leap to separate himself from all the
> candidates who have promised to take an unbalanced approach on the environment.
>
>         During an impassioned speech in support of free trade this month, Bush said,
> "If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow!"
>
>         Another great moment with Bush the Younger was his answer to the question, "Do
> you support affirmative action?"
>
>         Said the governor: "What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas,
> quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate,
> quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what
> everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position."
>
>         If you cast your mind back to the long-gone days .of 1992, you may recall that
> after four years of Big George's pronounless prose, Bill Clinton was considered
> something of a wonder because he spoke in complete sentences. Indeed, in
> complete paragraphs. People actually wrote about it at the time: "He speaks in
> complete sentences."
>
>         Of course, that was compared to Big George, who once delivered this complete
> sentence: "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the
> other." And a more typical bon mot: "To kind of suddenly try and get my hair
> colored, and dance up and down in a miniskirt or something, you know, show that
> I've got a lot of jazz out there and drop a bunch of one-liners, I'm running for
> the president of the United States. I kind of think I'm a scintillating fellow."
>
>         We were also accustomed to hearing from Dan Quayle in those days ("If we don't
> succeed, then we run the risk of failure"), so we're starting from a low
> threshold here - the rhetorical equivalent of having Dick Morris shape domestic
> policy.
>
>         The Nation recently described Al Gore as "an attack chihuahua" for a series of
> observatioris; that cannot be described as in the positive vein. Gore accused
> Bill Bradley of being a quitter, a hypocrite, a disloyal Democrat, a
> "left-of-center insurgent," who would break the bank with his "throwback"
> healthcare proposal while addressing "only a small number of things at a time."
>
>         The Nation notes that Gore is a charter Member of the Democratic Leadership
> Council, which campaigns for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing
> Medicare and school choice. This has not prevented Gore from assailing Bradley
> for proposing a debate on Social Security reforms and voucher experiments.
>
>         According to The Dallas Morning News, during the last debate in Iowa, when Alan
> Keyes accused Bush of doing nothing when the town of El Cenizo adopted Spanish
> as the language for all official business, Bush replied, "No es el verdad"
> (That's not the truth). That would, of course, be "la verdad" in Spanish.
>
>         Reminding us all of Jim Hightower's line when he was informed that Gov. Bill
> Clements was studying Spanish: "Oh, good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant."