She's Not Gone, Just Moved Away

The brilliant, beautiful, and late Molly Ivins has posthumously endorsed Barack Obama. What a prescient being she was, and how I miss her.

S.L. at TPM discovered this when he or she googled "Molly Ivins and Clinton." The first hit she got was titled "I will not support Hillary Clinton for president," and it says in part:

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. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

(Snip)

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes."

She wrote that in January of '06, before either of the current Democratic candidates had announced. I remember reading and agreeing with it at the time.

Nit-pickers and hair-splitters will protest that Obama is the junior senator from Illinois, not Minnesota. But as the seventies band Three Dog Night pointed out, "Oklahoma, or Arizona, what does it madda, what does it madda?"

We lost Molly 13 months ago, on the last day of January, 2007, to breast cancer. She never wrote of her terminal illness in her column, but instead used that space to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable right up to her last day on earth, and this final endorsement shows just how irreplaceable she was.