Molly Ivins, Rest in Peace

Molly Ivins died today in Texas. She was 62*:

What’s there not to like about a columnist who’d once written, “I’m not anti-gun; I’m pro-knife.” Molly’s point was, typically, half serious, tongue in cheek. If you use a gun, you don’t need to be in shape as you would if you had to kill someone running with a knife. Using knives, she said, actually would promote physical fitness….

A liberal’s liberal, Molly was genuinely home-spun and humble, a genuine product of the Lone Star state. She stood in stark contrast to the faux cowboy currently taking up space and oxygen in the Oval Office, a Connecticut Yankee desperately running away from his Ivy League upbringing and education and, in the process, giving hubris and arrogance an even worse name. Molly not only never ran away from her liberal roots in the one place where liberalism is perhaps the least welcome, she embraced it and let her freak flag fly high and proud.

H/t to JP for the correction on Molly’s age.

ISG Chair James Baker to Senate: ‘Give War a Chance’

The Iraq Study Group recommended ramping up diplomacy and putting more responsibility for patrolling the streets on Iraqi forces. It pointedly did not reccomend escalating the war. And yet, here is its co-chairman, the Republican operative and former Sec. of State under Bush’s daddy, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday:

James Baker, the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, on Tuesday endorsed President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq, urging the Senate to “give it a chance.”

“The president’s plan ought to be given a chance,” Baker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Just give it a chance.”

At which point all the Republican senators stood up, held hands and started singing the John Lennon song, “All we are saying is give war a chance!”

Barak to Fox: Don’t Mess with Obama

Cold shoulder: Remember last week when Fox News “reported” a story from the Moonie fishwrapper Washington Times about how Illinois Sen. Barak Obama was brainwashed in an Indonesian Muslim madrassah when he was 7? And remember how all the talking tools on wingnut TV and radio shows picked up the unattributed, unresearched and, as it turned out, untrue story?

Well, Obama has retaliated by cutting Fox reporters off. No comments, no interviews, no thanks, you’re not welcome on my really kool campaign for president.

If a candidate is serious about running for president, he or she is going to need Fox to reach out to voters in red and purple states.

The Fox reporters, typically, are whining:

“I’m still in the freezer,” one Fox journalist said, noting that the people at Fox “suffering the most did nothing wrong.”

My favorite, though, is the unnamed “source” who made the following addle-pated statement:

One source familiar with the dynamic between Fox and Obama, who asked not to be named, said Obama and his staff are in for a rude awakening if they think they can write off Fox News. If a candidate is serious about running for president, he or she is going to need a network like Fox to reach out to all those voters in the red and purple states, the source said.

One, red-staters who watch Fox News are not going to vote for a guy who’s even just half black. Second, Obama is going to get tons of coverage because — he’s Obama! Even voters who only watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh will still hear about him and his message.

So don’t let Fox off the hook too soon, Barak. Enjoy watching them twist in the breeze for a while.

McCarthyism: Useage of ‘Democrat Party’ Was Popularized by Joe McCarthy

Exhuming McCarthy: Pres. Bush’s deliberate use of the term “Democrat Party” in his State of the Union speech this month has put this too-cleverly couched linguistic smear back in the spotlight.

Misusing the noun Democrat as an adjective is just one of dozens of deceptive verbal tricks the Republicans used to gain power over the past few decades.

Republican politicans use this mangled syntax to express solidarity with their toothless, knuckledragging base. They don’t appear to care that, to independent voters and Democrats listening in, it makes them sound like the flaming assholes they are.

The origin of the Democrat smear is both surprising and not the least shocking. The man who first popularized it was Sen. Joe McCarthy — whose witch hunt against commies in the 1950s was nearly as destructive to the Republican Party then as George Bush’s needless war in Iraq is now:

[The] term became controversial as far back as the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) famously used it to deride Democrats during his hearings investigating whether Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. During the 1956 Republican convention, the usage was so common that it prompted the New York Times to report that dropping the “-ic” had become official party policy.

“‘Democratic’ as an adjective is not descriptive of the party as it exists today,” GOP spokesman L. Richard Guylay explained in that report, referring to allegations of vote-fixing by the Democratic Party’s political machine in large cities. “I can’t consider the party of the Pendergasts or Tammany Hall as a democratic party.”

In 1957, writing about the phenomenon in American Speech, the quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society, scholar Ignace Feuerlicht wrote: “It will be interesting to see whether ‘Democrat Party’ will stay with us or go out of existence again or be revived and revitalized at intervals just before successive national elections.”

Republican presidents ramp up their misuse of “Democcrat” in election years — even St. Ronnie did it:

President Reagan used it more in 1984, the year of his reelection campaign, than at any other time in his presidency. In the case of President Bush, the term shows up in his remarks more in 2004 and 2006 — both election years — than during the rest of his time in office.

In fact, Bush’s usage of the term increased dramatically last year; according to the American Presidency Project, based at UC Santa Barbara, the president was recorded using the term 22 times in 2006 — more than in the previous five years of his presidency combined.

Misusing the noun Democrat as an adjective is just one of dozens of deceptive verbal tricks Republicans used to gain power. In 1994, they finally exorcised the 40-year-old specter of McCarthyism and gained control of Congress. In 2000, they took the White House and, from there, the Supreme Court.

In grabbing power, however, the Republicans revealed their true nature. With the government under their control, rather than create the conservative utopia they had promised voters, they lied, cheated, took bribes, were fiscally and morally irresponsible and abusive of democratic principles as well as sacred Constitutional principles.

Now, with the hollowness of the so-called conservative ideology revealed for all to see, it’s hard to imagine how even the cleverest linguisitc trickery can ever fool the public again.

All we know for certain is that they will try.