Molly Ivins vs Sarah Palin

I can only imagine what Molly Ivins would say about Sarah Palin. One a brilliant and erudite columnist. The other a superficial wanna-be politician. One a writer of enormous talent. The other an illiterate spokes-person for all that is right. One a classy top-notch humorist. The other a silly jester. One honest to a fault. The other a fabricator of limitless proportions.

Unless they're comatose, everyone knows that Palin's Going Rogue is hitting the stores on Tuesday. It'll be interesting to see if it attracts crowds as large as the Harry Potter books. The media - the dirty, rotten, leftist state-owned media - already has copies. The New York Times has carried an Associated Press  piece sorting out fact from fiction. Apparently there's a lot of fiction. And since news articles are limited to a certain amount of space, you can bet there's a lot more fantasy to be had.

It's hard not to think of Molly Ivins when you think of Sarah Palin. In a review of the book by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith, Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life,  The Washington Post provides one of my favorite quotes. Ivins, referring to a Republican congressman, writes that if his "IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." Some statements are truely timeless.

Minutaglio writes in The Daily Beast:

Divorced from how you feel about her politics, most students of her work knew that she had perfected a magic act when it came to that public discourse; she talked about politics without the dour aura of either Emma Goldman or Charles Krauthammer. Nor did she scream with the raging acidity of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and their counterparts on the left. She chortled that Dubya was affable but a policy buffoon; she actually liked him personally, but hated his politics. And she spent years, and made a mint, working Bush over like his political career was one big speed bag.

Underneath her humor was a "tough and tender lady" whose life wasn't always easy. She had a domineering father who was in the oil business. She grew up in the River Oaks area of Houston - a conclave of richer than rich. The fact that Ivins turned out as she did and believed as she did after growing up in Texas is part miracle and part fantasy.