From The Star Tribune Minn
By Susan Lenfestey

It’s been a year since Molly Ivins died, leaving us to slog through the political landscape without her sanity-saving blend of insight, humor and outrage. Unlike Maureen Dowd, who delights in snippy wordplay, with Molly you felt the words erupting from her soul, ricocheting off her funny bone and then passing through her brain to be arranged in a way that made sense — an enormous challenge when dealing with the non-sense of the president she called “Shrub.”

As Super Tuesday closes in with the fate of — oh, just about everyone — at stake, I keep wishing I could open my paper and find Molly’s take on it all. What fun she would have had with the entire Republican slate, from the moribund-on-arrival Fred Thompson to the 12th-century worldview of affable Mike Huckabee to the transformation of “America’s Mayor” to America’s meltdown.

And she wouldn’t have let John McCain’s resemblance to an ermine — a short-legged weasel who changes color with the seasons — go unnoticed.

On the other side I imagine she’d have taken a few jabs at Dennis Kucinich for toe-tapping with a UFO and at John Edwards for his pricey girly-man haircuts — yet slapped them a high-five for the truths they dare to speak. She encouraged veracity no matter how eccentric the package; she just couldn’t tolerate “clever straddling,” as she put it.

She would have donned a hazmat suit to deal with the hydra-like beast called Billary that clawed its way to defeat in South Carolina. She was clear on where she stood on the Clintons, calling Bill “as weak as bus-station chili” and writing in January 2006, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation.”

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