Hey Molly, it's happy hour!
Posted on 07/22/2005 7:03:24 AM PDT by SJackson
Ask the Monitor to describe the columnist Molly Ivins while standing on one foot and there would be no fumbling for words. Molly Ivins is a nasty piece of work. The rest is commentary.
Ivins, a Texan who`s described herself as "a left-wing, aging Bohemian journalist," delivers her hard left views in prose distinguished by mean-spirited potshots marinated in a somewhat labored cornpone populism.
According to the iconoclastic author Florence King, Ivins is a "professional Good Ole Girl....Watching her go through her paces is like watching Ona Munson, who played Belle Watling in ‘Gone With the Wind,` doing an imitation of Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow in ‘Inherit the Wind.` That`s a lot of wind."
King is more than a disinterested observer — she wrote those words in a 1995 column for The American Enterprise titled "Molly Ivins, Plagiarist." Ivins, you see, had paid King the ultimate writer`s tribute by appropriating several passages of King`s work — though in some cases without proper attribution. King acknowledged that Ivins had on certain occasions cited her as a source, "but never where it counts. She credits me on minor observations, but when the subject is politics — her turf — she plagiarizes me."
Ivins apologized to King, saying she was "deeply ashamed," but characterized her literary transgression as one of sloppiness rather than premeditated theft. "I have no idea how the indirect quotations got scrambled up," she told the Washington Post at the time of the controversy. "I thought I had credited her every time I used her."
(Accusations of plagiarism were directed at Ivins again a few years later when a Texas publication, the Fort Worth Weekly, said she`d taken a story from its pages and misrepresented it as her own.)
The latest contretemps involving our Good Ole Girl were sparked by a column of hers at the end of June in which she insisted her opposition to the invasion of Iraq was based on her unimpeachable patriotism — and then proceeded to deliver herself of the following remarkable statement: "I think we have alienated our allies and have killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did." (Emphasis added)
Conservative bloggers had a field day with Ivins`s lunacy, and in a matter of days Ivins issued an apology that only served to raise new questions about her honesty and integrity:
"In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
"The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed....
"Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam`s killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens.... Saddam`s regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered....There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong....
"My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not to have checked. I am so sorry."
Did you catch Ivins`s confession that she "had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq...waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000"? So fixated was Ivins on bad-mouthing the U.S. that she was itching for the chance to portray the American military as a greater killer of Iraqis than the murdering despot the Americans had forcibly removed.
And when Ivins thought she finally had her opening, she recklessly rushed into print with something so outrageously untrue that she had no choice but to grovel once the gravity of her error became clear. Agree or disagree with her politics, can any serious person take her seriously?
The terrorists and former Baathists have killed over 12,000 Iraqis since the war began and they are killing more Iraqis every day. I wonder if Molly I will acknowledge it when the terrorists have killed more Iraqis than the Americans since the war began.
Saddam may have killed over 300,000 in years past but Iraqis still are under siege by the terrorists and former Baathists.
California was a totally different place in 1944, very much behind the war effort with lots of women working in the shipyards. There were also lots of farmers and just plain down to earth people. Almost everyone in my old neighborhood had migrated from the south or Texas, most to join the women working in the shipyards or oil refineries. The New York lefties had yet to move here, to show us the joys of socialism.
Well maybe she writes in the mode of another "journalist" Dan Rather so her stories are "wrong but accurate"
Isn't the the excuse Dunga Dan made up?
More like made up and wrong
Aren't they all?
For a long time I've wanted to place my 14EE up her you know what! She should be on Homeland Security's most wanted List.
sorry, during one of mine and helen thomas' back seat trysts
i had an epiphony that we were the most brutal murders of iraqis than saddam could ever dream to be.
during our cigarete break helen reinforced my stunning realization.
now it turns out that it was just our sexual fantacy being played out in print.
"Molly Ivins Says She`s Sorry"
Yes, she's sorry. But what did she do?
An irony since many claim that Maureed Dowd ofter steals from Helen Thomas.
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