Molly Ivins

Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America by Molly Ivins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


WARNING: political content ahead. Read at your own risk!

"For years, bestselling political commentator Molly Ivins has been sounding the alarm about George W. Bush. In Shrub, her 2000 skewering of presidential candidate Bush, the inimitable Ivins, with co-author Lou Dubose, offered a devastating expose of Dubya's career and abysmal record as governor of Texas. Now, in their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.

"Bushwhacked brings to light the horrendous legacy of the Bush tax cut, his increasingly appalling environmental record, his administration's involvement in the Enron scandal, and the real Bush foreign policy -- botched nation building in Kabul and Baghdad, alienation of former allies-- and, unfortunately, much more. Ivins and Dubose go beyond the too frequently soft media coverage of Bush to show us just how damaging his policies have been to ordinary Americans -- "The Doug Jones Average" rather than the Dow Jones Average. Bushwhacked is filled with sharp observation, humor, and compassion for the people often ignored by the federal government and the Washington press corps.

"With the war on terrorism posing unprecedented challenges to our civil liberties, it is high time for a close look at the state of our Union. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose provide just that in Bushwhacked -- an incisive, entertaining, and damning indictment of the Bush presidency."
~~front flap

I love Molly Ivins. She was extremely politically astute, and always presented her opinions wrapped in generous doses of humor. I often laughed out loud at her wry twists of language, all the while admiring her courage in "telling it like it is". She was Toto, a small dog drawing back the curtain that hid the charlatan, in order to show her friends the way smoke and mirrors were being used to distort reality.

It took me a long time to read this book. Bushwhacked is very different than her other books -- her sly sense of humor is conspicuous by its absence, and the chapters are filled with facts and statistics, and stories about the people that Dubya's policies have hurt. It's gut-wrenching to read this book, to be face-to-face with just how much his government is not "by the people or for the people." I knew most of this prior to reading the book, but it was still excruciating to read it again, all neatly packaged and no holds barred.

And as always when I read anything she wrote, I wonder what she would be saying about the current political scene. She'd be having a field day with the Republican wannabes, don't you think? Just as she'd be skewering the failings of the current White House occupant.

Where are you Molly, now that we need you!