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Ideology's Sista Solja
Molly Ivins has strongly held, weakly founded beliefs. Just about every
column while a Republican is in the White House is based on one principle:
whatever he and his cronies want is directed at the destruction of life as we
know it. So she waits on a daily basis to discover each new plot to
destroy the universe, and expose it to gull her readership. But
let's get on to the specifics:
- www.creators.com 9/23/03:
We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction,
the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this
country for $87 billion just for one year, and no one knows how long we'll be
there. Osama is hiding in a cave. Saddam is hiding in a
basement. We have proof that up until the day the invasion started
Saddam's operatives were working on making more chemical and biological
weapons, which was a violation of the treaty Saddam signed in 1991 and
numerous Security Council resolutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad blew up
the road map to peace, proving that peace is the last thing they want.
$87 billion a year is a tiny price to pay to establish a peaceful democracy
where there used to be a tyranny aspiring to establish regional hegemony on a
foundation of human corpses. And if we're there less than a decade that
will be a lot more worthwhile an entanglement than Clinton's pet war in the
Balkans has left us.
- www.creators.com 9/23/03:
I was in Florida during that chilling
post-election fight and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore
actually won Florida, not to mention getting 550,000-more votes than Bush
overall.
Fortunately for Molly, she can comfortably
hold opinions without concerning herself with the annoying qualification of
evidence. If I could decide what constituted a vote, I could declare
Bush the winner in every precinct in the nation. ("What's this, another
vote for Al Gore? Must be a mistake, since he'd be a horrible president
and no sane voter would vote for a horrible president. Another vote
for Bush!") But let me concede that, of the votes that were
counted, Bush got a half a million or so fewer than Al Gore. But in the
first place, there were millions of uncounted votes--more than enough to have
given Bush the popular vote, if it mattered. In the second place, it
didn't matter, because the electoral college protects the rights of all the
states to have an impact on the decision, so the overflow of votes for Gore in
tiny areas like Manhattan and Hollywood did not trump the overwhelming
advantage for Bush in most of the rest of the country.
- The Sunday Denver Post (Rocky Mountain News) 8/31/03:
This poignant Labor Day, when the numbers are bad, the policies are worse, and
the jobs are disappearing... She got off on the wrong foot, since
she obviously hadn't been reading the news. Growth numbers were good,
tax cuts were continuing to contribute to the improvement of the economy, and
unemployment was going down (and had been for weeks). [Update: And now
there have been nearly 300,000 new jobs created in the two months since she
expressed such a bleak outlook.]
- The Sunday Denver Post (Rocky Mountain News) 8/31/03: One
of [the Bush] administration's first actions was to repeal the ergonomic
regulations that prevent repetitive stress. She manages to make it
sound like the repealed regulations were the only protection against
repetitive stress. They were not. The regulations, imposed in
addition to existing workplace regulations, were so harsh that it would have
driven small companies out of business if one or two out of a small number of
employees developed some repetitive stress. It was a draconian measure
created by the Clinton administration in the eleventh hour because it would
have damaged Democratic prospects in the previous two elections. It was
repealed because it was damaging to business interests and insignificant to
any but the most rabid liberals.
- The Sunday Denver Post (Rocky Mountain News) 8/31/03:
This was almost as good as the time the administration solved global
warming by simply editing it out of an environmental report. Whether
or not global warming is occurring is not clear, and if we stipulate that it
is, it is not clear that the cause is chiefly human production of greenhouse
gases. At some point a full debate on this issue will find its way onto
these pages, but for the moment this will suffice: we know very little
about the other factors that can contribute to global warming. And it is
not clear that extra carbon dioxide (the main "greenhouse gas") actually stays
in the atmosphere. Many experiments indicate that existing plants
increase their absorption of CO2 when its concentration in the atmosphere
increases, suggesting that we do not need more plants to clean up the air, but
the existing ones will do it.
- Rocky Mountain News (Denver Post) 8/10/03: New
study shows 8 million mostly low-income taxpayers will get no benefit from the
latest round of tax cuts, despite assurances that it would help everybody who
pays income taxes. This is a true statement, but overstates the
point. Almost all of these low-income taxpayers have no dependents and
pay less than $600 in taxes. They make up less than 6 percent of
taxpayers. The Administrations statements were, therefore 94% true,
which is better by far than Ivins' own rate of accuracy.
- Rocky Mountain News (Denver Post) 8/10/03: Two and
a half million jobs have disappeared since Bush took office. Real wages
have stagnated or declined. Retirement savings have shrunk.
All true, but I suppose she is trying to make a point, and I suppose it is
somehow supposed to be Bush's responsibility. Here are some more facts,
for full disclosure: The recession began before Bush had a chance to
enact any policies. It ended shortly after his first tax cut, which
liberals promised would destroy our economy, went into effect. The
economy has been growing ever since, despite all the liberal attempts to "talk
it down." But SoothSeeker's advice, Molly: keep trying to blame Bush for
the sorry mess your boy Clinton made of the economy (it was growing when he
inherited it, and it was in free fall when he left it), and then when it turns
up despite your gloom and doom predictions, you'll have to congratulate Bush
for his top-notch domestic policy or concede your already evident hypocrisy.
- Rocky Mountain News (Denver Post) 8/10/03: If you're born
in this country, you're in debt. You have to help pay back the money the
Bushies took out of Social Security, plus interest on their debts.
The Social Security program was never going to pay for itself forever.
When it was created, most people were going to die before becoming eligible
for benefits. As long as that condition persisted, it was possible for
it to be solvent. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that
life expectancy would rise with time. Now, on average, people will live
on Social Security for well over a decade, and will have taken everything that
they invested in a matter of months. Furthermore, if Ivins could name a
single Democrat since the inception of the program who didn't spend the Social
Security surplus, she might have the beginnings of an argument. But if
she knew what she was talking about she would know that any surplus in the
'90's was spent (that's right, spent) by the Clinton
administration on the national debt. It's purely a matter of accounting.
FDR is responsible for the creation of a program that could never remain
solvent as it was designed. So he's the one who saddled our children
with the responsibility to pay for our Social Security, not George Bush.
Modified: 11/10/2003
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Jonathan Alter
David Corn
Walter Cronkite
Maureen Dowd
Al Franken
Ellen Goodman
Molly Ivins
Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Ed Quillen
Anna Quindlen
Welfare Follies
Chris Matthews
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