Thanks, Molly

Molly Ivins was not only a popular and elegant writer, but also the most fervent and dedicated critic of President Bush, a fellow Texan whom she had reduced to a single word with her book, Shrub.
Ivins, a best-selling author, widely circulated newspaper columnist and fierce critic of the president, lost a struggle with cancer yesterday. She was 62.
The columnist's convictions included a belief that Bush, a certain failure in the Texas oil business which had secured his own father's fortune, had taken advantage of the favors of friends to accumulate his own riches in Texas before seeking the presidency. At a time when the younger Bush was just emerging on the national stage, Ivins, the leading co-author of Shrub, chronicled the favors that had parlayed the loans of Bush family friends into a stake in the Rangers that eventually made Bush $15 million and enabled him to embark on a political career, first as governor and ultimately as president.
As recently as January, Ivins had encouraged readers of her column to rise up against the president's deployment of new troops in Iraq.
"We are the people who run this country,'' Ivins wrote in her Jan. 11 column. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.''
"The minimum we should expect of Bush in return for dropping impeachment (or not)," she wrote eight months ago, "is that he cease breaking the law." "She tried never to make more than half the city mad on the same day. Eventually they all got mad."
Ivins wrote of President Reagan and Nancy Reagan in 1989: "His mind is mired somewhere in the dawn of social Darwinism and she's a brittle, shallow woman obsessed with appearances, but then it was that kind of decade, wasn't it."
She once said that if a certain politician was any stupider he would have to be watered once a day.

To Ivins, "liberal" wasn't an insult term. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."