Molly Ivins - Nothin But Good Times Ahead

Three cheers for Molly Ivins, that rare birda journalist who doesnt bury her sympathies in professional cynicism and regards politics as the real New Vaudeville.

Los Angeles Times

If you arent already a believer youll likely join the faithful after reading this latest collection. Delivered with wit, precision, and down-home, in-your-face, good-ol-gal, whoop-it-up joy.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Funny, rambunctious. Shes great.

Cosmopolitan

[Ivins] sends forth salty opinions on everything from gun control to Camille Paglia.

Washington Post Book World

Molly Ivins is one of the funniest political columnists currently covering the national scene.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Biting, shrewd and hilarious political satire rife with one-liners and absurd plot twists. What Ivins does like no one else is deliver the punch line. A must read.

Indianapolis Star

A straight-up populist, funny and vulgar and plain piqued. At her best, she combines humor, outrage and good reporting.

New York Daily News

Molly Ivins Cant Say That, Can She?
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
Shrub
Bushwhacked

Molly Ivins was a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She was formerly a reporter and columnist with the Dallas Times Herald. She has written for national newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek. She died in 2007.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1994

Copyright 1993, 1994 by Molly Ivins

All rights under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

The essays in this work were originally published in Dallas Times Herald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Mother Jones, The Nation, Newsweek, The Progressive, The Texas Observer, and Time.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Natural History magazine for permission to reprint an excerpt from Menu for a Monkey (March 1993).
Copyright 1993 by the American Museum of Natural History.

Reprinted by permission.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Ivins, Molly.
Nothin but good times ahead / by Molly Ivins.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-43447-0
1. United StatesPolitics and government1993 Humor.
2. United StatesPolitics and government19891993Humor.
3. PresidentsUnited StatesElection1992Humor. I. Title.
E885.195 1993
973.9290207dc20 9310401

v3.1

To my father, Jim Ivins,
who taught me to love books,
and
To my mother, Margot Milne Ivins,
who taught me to love laughter

AUSTIN, TEXASWatching Bill Clinton be president is a lot like watching Billy Kilmer play football. Many of you will recall the former Washington Redskins quarterback, who had the unfortunate habit of starting every play by dropping back at least twenty yards. Then the opposition would push him back another twenty. You just knew they were going to nail him in the end zone, you couldnt even stand to watch. And then, at the last second, hed get the pass off. But it was always a terrible pass. It would wobble and flutter, looking like a wounded mallard. When it finally arrived at the other end of the field, you knew it was bound to be interceptedtheyd all jump up after it; then theyd all fall down. And it would turn out hed gained three or four yards. Clinton, like Kilmer, is excruciating to watch, but he keeps moving the ball.

Much of this book is about how the country came to elect Bill Clinton in 1992, thus costing me twenty-five years worth of eyewitness reporting on what a total doofus George Bush can be. Damn, I miss him.

From here in the old Texas perch, Clintons adventures in Washington look mildly peculiar. Perhaps its because we were at ground zero of the S & L disaster that Whitewater looks like such a piddly, dribbly-poop deal. Good Lord, have none of those Washington scandal-mongers ever seen a real scum-sucking, blue-bellied, full-blooded, ur-thieving, out-goddamn-rageous S & L deal in their lives? Pathetic, thats what Madison Guaranty S & L was; no thieves, bad judgment, poor regulation, 5 percent of the cost of the Silverado failure, and .001 percent of the total S & L bill. In Texas, we even know about the cattle-futures market of the late seventies, where, due to one of Richard Nixons many bad moves, horny-handed sons of the soil got rich overnight, just like Hillary Clinton, with good advice.

As for the incredible (a word I use advisedly) spread of tales about Clintons private life, as the bumper-sticker says, Bush LostGet Over It.

When all this started, the great sea change from years of Republican rule, I was goin along all right therejust your fairly normal human political reporterwhen I accidentally became a best-selling arthur, as we say in East Texas. This will complicate your life. In fact, I wound up feeling like Admiral James Stockdale: Who am I? What am I doing here?

When a girl like I (Janet Reno is my Fashion Goddess) becomes conversant with such television concepts as eyebrow mousse, the cultural confusion is almost as awful as a redistricting fight in the Texas Legislature. But I have done my best to soldier on, aided by a political landscape so deliciously wacky not even the vicissitudes of bein an arthur can distract one for long.

The best description I ever found of what its like to be a political reporter appeared, curiously enough, in Natural History magazine, deftly sandwiched into an article by a female biologist who studies the diet of the muriqui monkey. Anyone who has ever chased a politician around trying to get a usable quote will be stunned by the accuracy of this scientific account of the procedure:

Occasionally the feces land neatly in my glove, but more often they splatter uselessly in the tangled vegetationor else fall alongside another muriquis feces, so that I cannot tell whose is whose. So even though the muriquis defecate often and, in the case of adults, abundantly each time, getting a clean sample sometimes means tailing one muriqui for up to six hours without pause.

My pursuit of this delicate trade keeps getting interrupted by the odd jobs that fall to the arthur in our time. At one point in the last presidential campaign, I had to leave Little Rock and fly to New York City to appear at a literary tea for my publisher.

I dutifully flew to New York, and I dutifully reported to the Waldorf-Astoria, where sure as a by-God there were 350 blue-haired ladies having tea. I met my fellow arthurs. We were: Elmore Leonard, who writes the great murder mysteries out of Detroit City (Ive met him twice now, so I call him Dutch); Professor Henry Gates of Harvard University, a black intellectual and a very hot ticket on the multicultural circuit; and Ivana Trump. Ivana, as she asked us to call her, paid somebody to write a really bad novel for her, which, I point out in her defense, is still better than Marilyn Quayles novel.