I just learned from Scalzi that the columnist Molly Ivins has died. According to her obit, it was breast cancer and she was 62, about the same age as my mom.

This is really shaping up to be a crappy day.

In an occupation filled with self-important, mean-spirited blowhards who aren’t nearly as funny or smart as they think they are, Molly Ivins was a class act. Yes, she was unabashedly liberal, and yes, she was unsparing in her criticism of those politicians she thought were in the wrong, but she was also a sharp thinker who was motivated more by common sense and heartfelt populism than cynical partisanship. She took plenty of shots at Bill Clinton during his time in office, too. And she was damn funny when she did it. I’m going to miss her columns, which so often seemed to say (in folksier language, of course) exactly what I was thinking and feeling but couldn’t quite articulate.

I’m sure everyone who writes about Molly today will link to these items as well, but here is a tribute to her by her editor at Creator’s Syndicate, from which you can navigate to all her 2006 columns, and here is her final column, a protest against the president’s “surge” plan. Personally, however, I much preferred an earlier one that included this cri de couer:

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

 

It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they’re arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we’ve let them do it. [Emphasis hers.]

Yep, there she goes again, saying what I’ve been thinking in better language than I’ve managed to summon on my own.