Unintentional ASMR - Molly Ivins (Texas Accent) **NO INTERVIEWER** Corrupted US Politics/Being Texan

he is one of the oldest sins in politics you got to dance with them with runya and what it means is that when you get to but when you get to office when you get to public office you vote with the folks who put you there and that used to mean your constituents the people who voted for you but more and more what it means is you vote with the special interests who put up the money to get you to public office and part of what this book is about is the corruption of the american political system by money it's not as though american politics had ever been pristine and pure of course not money has always been there but money nowadays is the dominant factor by such an enormous margin that i think it is making not just a qualitative but not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference in american politics it's a pickup truck it's just a picture of me in a pickup truck sure and down in austin texas right near where i live i drive a pickup truck myself but that is not my pickup truck that's an old one they love some kind of texas connection they always like to put something up on the cover that reminds people that i'm a texan well good lord there's a question um i think my own feeling is that texans are just like everybody else only more so uh that there is a slight quality of exaggeration a slightly larger-than-life pie-eyed quality about the whole state that makes it a lot of fun i love to tease lubbock it's out in west texas and it's just as flat as pancake and i must say to the uninitiated eye it does not appear to be one of the world's more attractive cities but that's because you don't know the people there they are just as straightforward and open-hearted and good as they can be i believe that's right of course it's true you can't make up stuff like that and you never need to make up anything in texas because bizarre and strange things just always happen as a matter of course uh east texas is the very southern part of the state in fact i sometimes think that east texas is more like the old south than the old south is anymore about 50 of the population there is black it was plantation cotton farming part of this part of the state but west texas is a totally different cattle fish it's the dry ranching part of the state of a lot of there are a fair number of hispanics and in west texas and in south texas now they're the majority but that looks the western part of the state looks more like what you would think of texas in a cowboy movie opening of every day in the session we have prayer and we need it the ledge it gets too long to write legislature every time you need to talk about what they've been up to actually a lot of people around the lads you call it the ledge bob bullock the national politician of texas he is a piece of work the lieutenant governor of the state of texas uh he's been around since god was a pup he was before he was like gov he was a state comptroller and under our constitution like most southern states we have a weak governor system so that the lieutenant governor is the guy who really has the clout and bob bullock is one of the smartest shrewdest toughest and sometimes meanest politicians i have ever known he's a remarkable piece of work he's been sober for quite some time he went to whiskey school out in california many years ago uh but before that he was a roar and he drank just enormous amount and as people who drink a lot do he would not infrequently get himself into trouble and one time one of his early wives he used to get married a lot too um kicked him out of the house we assumed for good cause and he went over to stay with a friend of his but his friend wasn't turned out drinking bob couldn't get into that apartment but he spotted his friend's car in the alley behind the apartment so he opened the back door and crawled into the back seat and fell asleep in the back seat of the car he woke up the next morning and the car was being driven down the highway by total stranger it was not his friend's car at all and there was bob in the back seat thinking about how to handle this and finally he just sat bolt up right and said to the into the driver's ear hi there i'm bob bullock your secretary of state that's a true story and he's still lieutenant governor um i think it's much ado about nothing um the idea that somehow this is uh some kind of police come down upon you if you use words that are offensive uh i think it's nonsense it seems to me that political correctness was uh is maybe just an attempt to codify good manners or kindness you don't go around using words that offend people if you have any sense at all on the other hand to prissy up language seems to me always a mistake i like language that's strong and earthy and vigorous and salty i like to use the full range of the english language hairy-legged women them hairy-legged women he does that all the time to annoy us of course he is in texas i think of necessity we have a larger tolerance for um for uh politicians who are not politically correct i mean we could wait a long darn time before we found one who uh always spoke as we wanted wampercharge that just left him one for y'all that means with his mouth not only open staring in amazement but so amazing kind of like you can say of a suitcase when you mess up the lid to the body the suitcase your suitcase is wamperjawed it means just astonished left-hand wamper job no no well it's no texas word slime balls well it seems to me that that is a word in great general use and a useful word it is because there are many of them hanging around people with no ethics no integrity just total slime balls good on you that's that's another old texas expression good on you you can even say it it's it's approbation it's um it's uh encouragement you're doing right well she was uh had been defeated at that point she lost the governorship to george w bush and i wrote a column about the four years she was in office and uh it's my judgment that ann richards was an awfully good governor and so i think i closed that column by saying good on you well as i say in our state we have the weak governor system so that really not a great deal is required of the governor not necessarily know much or do much and we've had a lot of governors who did neither anne i think was one of our more effective governors although in the odd way of american politics i'm not sure i could point to a whole lot that she actually got done it was mostly a matter of keeping bad things from happening one of the main reasons she lost the governorship was because she vetoed the concealed handgun bill and we've got a bunch of gun nuts in texas who were bound and determined that they should be able to march around with concealed weapons somebody who loves guns loves guns think that that's just the most important thing in the whole world no lots of them they're people who are crazy about guns um i have never um i don't hunt myself but i i sure do know a lot of people who do and i've never thought especially in a in a state like texas where there's an awful lot outdoors that it's ridiculous to try and take away long guns but i've never seen any use in a you know in a society that is what are we now at least 70 percent urban what is the point of a handgun where's the point of letting people have handguns that's just endless tragedy after endless tragedy because of these things they've been little machines designed to do nothing but kill people and the amount of people in this number of people in this country who get liquored up or have no sense to begin with or get furiously angry and go and kill one another i just think it's ridiculous that's the way texans say government that government you know we've got to get the government off our backs got to get the government off you know that's the way people talk i just write the way people talk i don't invent this stuff and it's exactly the way texans say the word business business engineer when i'm i'm not sure i could say all anymore we've got a lot of texans we've moved in from somewhere else but almost anyone who's a native will say that venice some is not uh a dirty word in texas it's not like s.o.b uh a sumbitch is the texas word for fella or guy well he's a good old son and then added something said to me he said and there's no there's no offense intended boy i don't even remember snur sometimes i do make up words actually luckless fellows you luckless fellows i did make that word up it just sounds right oh well not hatchets a fine insult um referring to uh someone being a little bit loosely wrapped someone being work perhaps not having a firm grip on reality you know when you write about texas politics it is necessary to find words that are highly descriptive ah garbanzo brains right bean brains tiny tiny tiny brains it's a bean it's a bean i don't know gazoonies another word i can tell you the the uh need you have for descriptive terms for stupid when you write about texas politics is practically infinite now i'm not claiming that our state legislature is dumber than the average state legislature but it tends to be dumb in such an outstanding way it's again that texas quality of exaggeration and being slightly larger than life and there are a fair number of people in the texas legislature um of whom it can fairly be said if dumb was dirt they would cover about an acre and um i'm not necessarily opposed to that i agree with an old state senator who always said that if you took all the fools out of the legislature it would not be a representative body anymore that's right seems to me if you're going to do something if you're really going to get something done you're going to tick somebody off pretty seriously and i am more and more persuaded that politics itself is the art of finding that thin tiny sliver of daylight in the huge wall of obstruction that prevents anything from getting done about anything i live in austin texas the state capitol since uh let's see this go around since about 85 86. i had lived in austin earlier uh i was editor co-editor of the texas observer back in the 70s no i'm from east texas originally i went to high school in houston texas well i sort of fell into it backwards uh when i was coming up uh about the only talent i ever showed aside from basketball which looked like it would be pretty hard to make a living doing that was for writing and i loved to read and my only interest my big interest love besides literature was politics so i sort of fell naturally backwards into journalism combined writing in politics and there you are with journalism well um my first political involvement was in the civil rights movement where i came along at a time when if you were young and idealistic in in the south that was you pretty much were drawn to that my family is quite conservative my father is i would say extremely conservative yes he is my mama bless her heart um passed on i sometimes think it may have been my mother's fault my mother tried she she would certainly assure you without success to drill good manners into my head and in some ways i think that manners are just a formal expression of how you treat people and in the way black people were treated before the civil rights movement it was clear to me was very wrong it was an easy call yeah um both republicans lifelong my mama was ditzy there's no question about it she truly was she was asking minded she was uh fuzzy about the practical details of life too and and and it was of course it made for some hilarious stories and we loved to tease her yep horrible housekeeper mm-hmm my my mother had her brother so she would not be up and bustling about doing things she liked to sit a lot watch television eat talk she enjoyed people she was an absolute charmer three kids and um my sister is now teaching school in albuquerque new mexico my brother's a lawyer in bernie texas smith it's a good school i really do think i got a good education at smith i was uh not i'm not one of those people who thinks of my college years as a happy golden time i mean i was a texan who was up in massachusetts first of all i was cold i mean i was freezing to death the whole time i was up there and i found uh yankees rather in some ways chilly and difficult compared to the texans i was used to but i do think i got an off the good education grateful for it history my major is history six years with the new york times um some of it in new york is a political reporter at city hall in albany and then later as bureau chief out in the rocky mountains ah now there is something that uh when i've been standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and if i really need to impress people i just let fall that i covered elvis's funeral and uh boy people just practically draw back with awe it may yet turn out to be my greatest claim to fame um i was sitting in the new york city times one day when i noticed a whole nother lot of editors up around the desk uh having a great scrum of concern you could tell it looked sort of like an ant hill that had just been stepped on and it turned out the new york times has a large obituary desk and they prepare obituaries for anybody of prominence who might croak but it turns and you may recall that elvis presley died untimely and they were completely unprepared now this is an enormous news organizations they have rock music critics and classical music critics and opera critics but they didn't have anybody who knew about elvis presley's kind of music so they're looking across a whole acre of reporters and uh you could see them decide aha ivins she talks funny she'll know about mr presley so i wind up writing elvis's obituary for the new york times i had to refer to him throughout is mr presley it was agonizing that's the style at the new york times mr presley give me a break and the next day they sold more newspapers than they did uh after john kennedy was assassinated so that even the editors of the new york times who had not quite you know been culturally attracted to elvis decided that we should send someone to report on the funeral and now i drew that assignment what a scene it was that's exactly what he said shame ever said die while the trainers turned down and i kind of raised my eyebrows and sure enough i realized what he what he meant after i had been there for a while because you know shriners in convention i don't know if you've ever seen a whole lot of shriners in convention but uh they were having a huge national convention that very week in memphis and they tend to wear their little red fizzes and sometimes they drink too much and they uh march around the hotel hallways shooting on new year's eve horns and riding those funny little tricycles and generally cutting up and having a good time that's your shriners in convention always something very edifying and enjoyable to watch but though every every hotel room in memphis was occupied with uh celebrated shriners and then elvis dies and all these tens of thousands of grieving hysterical elvis presley fans descend on the town so you got a whole bunch of sovereign hysterical helves fans you got a whole bunch of kavorton shriners and on top of that they were holding a cheerleading camp and uh the cheerleading camp i don't know if you're familiar with the the ethos of the cheerleading camp but the deal is that every school sends its team of cheerleaders to cheerleading camp and your effort there at the camp is to win the spirit stick which looks to the uninitiated eye a whole lot like a broom handle painted red white and blue but it is the spirit stick and should your team win it for three days running you get to keep it but that has never happened and the way you earn the spirit stick is you show most spirit you cheer for breakfast lunch and dinner you cheer when the pizza man brings the pizza you do handsprings and over in down the hallway to the bathroom i tell you those young people will throw show an amount of spirit that would just astonish you in an effort to win that stick so here i was for an entire week dealing with these three groups of people the young cheerleaders trying to win the spirit stick the cavorting shriners and the grieving hysterical elvis fans and i want to assure you that the new york times is not the kind of newspaper that will let you write about that kind of rich human comedy because the new york times at least in my day was a very stuffy pompous newspaper uh a little bit better a little bit better than it was has it has it has a tendency recidivist tendencies though you you will notice if you read the times it collapses into pomposity and stuffiness with some regularity well um i i actually got into trouble at the new york city times for describing a community chicken killing out west as a gang pluck a rosenthal was then the editor of the times and he was not amused oh no it never made it in the paper good heavens no such thing would never get in the times in my day i was just sort of put on the on the uh on the s list we used to call it at the times the shitless what the hell these people are grown-ups well it just i decided that i didn't have enough time in my life to waste uh trying to get off the new york times last night was a silly thing like that and i got a call from the dallas times herald and what they said was come home and we will give you absolute freedom you can write whatever you want about whatever you want to and you can say whatever you want to and you know in the newspaper business it doesn't get a lot better than that almost never almost never and and uh if they changed anything um i would they would bring it to me and i would look at it and say you're absolutely right let's change that since 1990 three times that's a that's not at all unusual in our business these giant media corporations keep merging and merging and and you keep getting bought by somebody else and somebody else the single meanest line i ever heard said about anybody roy cohn the late roy cohn was in my opinion one of the most despicable human beings who ever lived he was a a ruthless lawyer and a shameless human being and i know that he has friends still living but i'm i'm entitled to my opinion too i think roy cohn was one of the most despicable people who ever lived and he was in fact cy new house's lawyer the lawyer this great magnate this uh media magnate new house i never worry about biting the hand that feeds me i'm you know i realize that's an old saying but um i think you're much better off telling the truth why would you know why i've never worried about offending the powers that be same same like um i'll deal with the times harold they we we just if they have a problem they bring it to me and i almost always agree that whatever they think needs to be changed needs to be changed but it rarely happens last year 1997 i got to teach at the university of california at berkeley um just for one quarter and it was the first time i ever really taught and i loved it of course i'm going to make fun of it i mean berkeley california if you are from texas it's just hilarious well of course it is just the absolute center of liberalism and political correctness and it is a veritable hotbed of people of bless their hearts who all think alike in a liberal way and of course i'm sometimes called a liberal myself and you would think i would have felt right at home there but i just i am so used to so used to texas that i found the culture of berkeley hysterical there are local characters there in berkeley one guy walks around with no clothes on he's the naked man and the other guy wears nothing but pink it is just he wears nothing but pink and everybody knows him there's the pink man it's the kind of community where people like that are rather relished and cherished the birkenstocks are those those famous uh sandals that um they're they're good for your feet um they're they're not fashion sandals they're they're they're kind of squat looking uh sandals that uh hippies and people uh people with foot trouble wear and of course berkeley being full of people who are far too sensible to ruin their feet by walking around in high heels there are a lot of folks who wear those sandals there very very bright people um i was really pleased i had thought like many people in our business i've been sort of grumpy um about young people coming into journalism recently because it seems to me we've gotten an awful lot of ambitious little careerists and i keep looking at them and thinking myself damn why didn't they go into investment banking but uh the students i've had at berkeley were not just bright but idealistic to a remarkable degree well they're gonna have some of it ground out of them there's no question about that um but it's my hope that they'll stay with it long enough to make a difference well part of it is an old tradition in the newspaper business as is true in many others there is a sort of tradition that um i call it the marine corps mentality you know listen to the sun i eat chip when i was young and you can do it too it'll make a man out of you it'll put hair on your chest i mean the idea that you should somehow uh as part of making someone pay their dues uh put them through a bad time and i think it's a terrible mistake one of the things we still do in the newspaper business is take bright talented idealistic young people and give them the world's worst most boring assignments we make the right obituaries or some boring thing why not take them and put them immediately on some big series where they you could use all that energy and idealism um i've always thought that was a mistake the way we treat young people in our business and it's true in a lot of fields it's funny people will get upset at what they they think is vulgar language forgetting that words often have dual meanings and what i was that the reason i made that point in the column is because i do think that context is everything and this was in in a column about criticism and indeed censorship of a television program from which snippets had been taken that made it look as though it was some you know very prurient salacious program when actually it was a very fine and intelligent program mcnamara's book in which he essentially apologized for vietnam and admitted that it was a terrible mistake had just come out and what interested me was the reaction there were an extraordinary number of people who sort of refused to accept mcnamara's apology and i am of the vietnam generation it was a war i oppose very strongly it's one of the most horrible events in the entire history of this nation mistake is a word that barely covers that tragedy but it seemed to me impossible not to accept and recognize mcnamara's finally painfully having come to the realization of not only having been wrong but the terrible cost of having been that wrong robert strange mcnamara that middle name was always telling i thought um i thought it was brave of him and right of him to have written that book and that he deserves to be commended for it i think that vietnam was a terribly destructive episode and i'm it's interesting to me as somebody who was young in the 60s to hear now the constant references to the 60s as those sex drugs and rock and roll were the only things that happened um i was very like many young people in the 60s i was very political and as far as i was concerned the 60s were about first the civil rights movement and then the anti-war movement and i miss sex drugs and rock and roll entirely damn what a fool but it was a time i thought of great idealism and then when when uh the country got dragged into vietnam i think it dragged a lot of people into despair and cynicism and nihilism because it was just so stupid a lot i think that if you are in a position of political leadership and you don't question yourself um you're apt to go very wrong i think a becoming degree of self-doubt is one of the best qualities we can look for in leaders yeah i think a lot of people are looking for certainty they are very very uncomfortable with the idea that things are never going to be cut and dry that there's never going to be a set of rules that always apply um i'd pick humor of course well i do think it's important and i do try to write about politics in a way that makes people laugh now there's two reasons for that one is politics is intrinsically funny and that and this should be noted and appreciated by all um and second i think it's important we in in a time when people so look down on politics that are so reluctant to get involved or even learn very much about it yeah i constantly hear people say things like in politics they're all crooks who cares them very dismissive and it seems to me that in part that's because people who write and report about politics make it so boring i mean you read those newspaper articles that start house bill 327 was passed out a subcommittee by a unanimous vote on tuesday i mean who wants to read any more than that you take i've seen reporters time and again take all the juice and joy and life and comedy and drama and humanity and excitement out of politics they just ring it all out and what they leave you with is this dried set of lifeless fact that has nothing to reflect at all the the whole splendid panorama that is politics every time we have a birthday in this country i sort of write a column celebrating us i like to do that isn't this wonderful we do that all the time always taking polls to find out how stupid we are and then we sit there reading the pose going oh my god look at this we're all so stupid in that wonderful it's such a comic thing for people to do because we're funny people i swear that's true i've been up to canada that is their national motto now let's not get excited i was up there one time when they were having a national election that was practically a revolution they threw out the party that was in power they completely took off a party that had been there forever practically disappeared a whole new set of folks came in and all the commentators were there on election nights saying now let's not get excited when they win the world series instead of cutting up and going wild and people downtown honking and dancing the way they would in america the canadians always go this is quite wonderful but let's not get excited well of course i think those are both important things one is that and i think it's the fault of people in our business brian the media presents such a negative picture where we're just so relentlessly negative i don't think it's that the media are left-wing or right-wing but they are negative and that's partly the nature of the world if you've ever noticed that uh the world news is always worse than the national news and the national news is always worse than the state news and the state news is always worse than the local news and local news is always worse than whatever has happened in your neighborhood that day well of course the world is pretty much like your neighborhood the whole world is pretty much like your neighborhood not much horrible ever happens there but the news business so focuses on the bizarre the disastrous and the unusual that people get the sense that the world out there is much more dangerous and dark than it actually is well it's full of nice folks and then my second point in that piece about the pursuit of happiness people sometimes think that the pursuit of happiness is you know somehow it's written in the constitution that we all have a right to go off on a great search for self-fulfillment and satisfaction and frisks and jollification actually that's about looking for a way to find justice i believe that it to be absolutely true now minnesotans are a little tired of being called nice understandably so they sort of wince but the truth is they're awfully nice in minnesota what about like the pyramids of ancient egypt like the coliseum of ancient rome we have the mall of america it's been a couple years now what an amazing place what what a great temple to consumption that is oh there's a world of stuff at the mall of america you just hardly would not believe it there's the entire stores that sell nothing but barrettes and hair bows there's stores that sell nothing but different kinds of popcorn you would not believe the variety of stuff there is in this world well now there's a good question um it's partly because uh you know in the capitalist system they push you to consume and an enormous amount of time money and skill is spent persuading us to buy things like pink lemonade and striped toothpaste which are not exactly basic necessities in this world the amount of money spent on a single television ad is frequently a 30-second ad frequently costs more than the entire 30-minute program surrounding the ad tommy lover yeah i get a lot of those um there are certain topics i used to sort of say well there's certain topics that sort of rattle their cages you're always going to hear from the haters if you write about death penalty abortion um i think it's the mothers there's a series of of subjects that just always touch off the nut cases and then i thought about it again and i thought gosh it's practically everything i like touches them off oh yeah gates homosexuals that that sets them off too you bet i'll tell you what if you want to stir things up and uh get people screaming you to bring up god gazing guns in my state i mean it's hell with the height off yeah that's a certain kind just teeth rattling mean meaner than a skillet for morale snakes we have them down in texas because they'll do things that are gratuitously cruel in the name of conservatism like you know cut milk for children or something that it just makes no sense fiscally because they're mean there is it's it's always hard for me to identify the uh you know i think this is true on the liberal side too but the the legitimate thoughtful philosophical consistent conservatism and there are a lot of conservatives i admire i really do jim kilpatrick seems to me to be a very thoughtful conservative the writer james i find him consistently thoughtful and and a very principled person and i understand that political point of view but to me we've been getting more and more uh people to the right of people that i always thought were very conservative like kilpatrick and barry goldwater now we've got people the right of them who seem to think that that government should be used in a punitive way against poor people i mean it's not just that they're opposed to welfare it's like let's really make sure these people never get a chance to get anywhere like it's just so mean mean-spirited jesse helms sets me off pretty bad i just find him a mean-spirited person phil graham there's another one he sees um there's something in addition to the mean-spiritedness there's a kind of smarminess about graham that i find distasteful but then i don't like him some people do now now we're talking about my favorite trio of bozos tom delay dick army and bill archer are these three powerful republican congressman from texas and i must say of the three delay is probably the only one who is actively stupid the other two are really fairly bright i just happen not to agree with them politically uh but delay sometimes you do have to question that man's sense oh he one of his ideas is that we should bring back ddt he's he's one of those people who thinks that uh environmentalism is is uh a non a nonsensical and pernicious thing he wants to bring back ddt he used to be a bug exterminator in sugarland texas that's what he did for living he exterminated bugs and before he went into congress oh sure oh yeah sure he was in the texas legislature for a while he wasn't i never thought he was that bad when he was in the legislature he seemed like a sort of regular vanilla republican but he'd seen certainly has taken on some strange coloration in washington he's a figure in a film called being there who is an opaque person into whom other people read whatever they want in this figure the chauncey gardner guy conservatives think he's conservative liberals think he's a liberal um you know um people read into him whatever they want to see there and there is a touch of that about bill clinton i think he's a politician and i say that i may be one of the last people left in america who does not use that word as a pejorative i like to watch politicians work remember when i was talking earlier about the art of politics been able to find this little thin sliver that allows you to get something done well it gets harder and harder to get anything done about anything because our politics have gotten to be so head buddy and and uh people just going against one another out of knee-jerk reaction rather than concentrate on fixing a problem and clinton is good and by that i mean he can find a way to get things done it's not necessarily the solution he'll finally get through may not be the best way to fix the problem may not be the most efficient or least costly but it is the politically doable way and that's that's a great skill that's actually a great art sure um he's a politician you know like all politicians he's a compromiser and in my opinion he compromises far too easily and far too often he'll often give away nine tenths of the loaf just to get one slice seems to me you ought to hold out for at least half there is a bunch of people almost all of us women but a couple of men go along too and we have been for many years now taking outdoor wilderness adventure trips together and it started back in 1980 when a bunch of us did a whitewater raft trip out in idaho and every year that group that group it'll it shifts some some years so some people can't go and other people come in it's not not exactly the same crowd every time but uh a bunch of us who uh i think when we started doing this nobody was particularly important or any kind of a big cheese we were 20 years ago we were just young and funny and and enjoyed one another and we got to where we we'd almost every summer we'd go and on on a trek in the himalayas or climb mashupishu or take a kayak trip or in alaska or we've done all kinds of wonderful things together we really do have an awfully good time it is sheer fun uh you might think that you know with say heavy hitters members of the cabinet and this kind of thing on all along on a trip that we would sit around having deep philosophical conversations or weighty policy discussions we revert to being complete 13 year olds on this trip we're just giggling really silly ah that's a good question they often do uh almost always they they take them start taking themselves quite seriously they're still teasable they're still teasable yeah i do not more in donna than alice rivlin alice rivlin seems to me to have been to be a wonderfully consistent human being i think donna donna is the same good person she always was and she's trying to i think everything that she tries to do is good i mean i think all the policies idea good of course she is remarkably effective in government but i see um seeing donna a um i guess it's just used to being used to dealing with people in your daily life who are household names in the rest of the country sometimes you get the impression that she's so used to dealing with big names big people and important people that maybe she's not hanging out enough time with people of no particular distinction but great delight well he knows uh perfectly well that my uh my opinions are uh sort of on the left side political spectrum i consider myself a populist rather than a liberal but i'm not worth quarreling over a populist a populist is somebody who sees politics more from an economic perspective than an ideological perspective i often argue that i don't think politics is a spectrum that runs from right to left it's a scale that runs from top to bottom and i think the only real political questions are who's getting screwed and who's doing this grilling that that does i've i've often wondered uh in fact i'm glad my publisher called him and asked him for the blurb and that i didn't i think it's bad policy for a journalist to owe a politician i really do yeah oh yeah oh yeah jim is one of the great texas populists you know the populism started uh in texas i mean that's where the movement first came out of that thin stony soil in the central hill country of texas and for years we had wonderful populist representatives wright patman in congress and sam rayburn ralph yarborough in the senate and the best texas politics were politicians were always at least part populist but it's uh we i don't think we have anyone in public office anymore who really counts it's a true populist sure they did these key carried water for the oil companies in the 1950s constantly he was the senator from texas oil when he was in the senate oh yes the the lord impersonation problem this has worried me considerably right i'm very fond of writing for small progressive magazines that pay in the high two figures this is the kind of fiscal sanity that has made me the woman of great wealth that i am today this cad claiming to be god what happened was a bunch of folks from florida texas florida florida texas it's up in the panhandle it's a particularly undistinguished town and a whole bunch of them believed that the lord had told them to get naked get in the car and drive to louisiana and they get as far as venting louisiana and their car hits a tree and to the absolute astonishment of the people who saw it happen out of this car come about 20 naked people include a bunch of kids who were stuck in the back i think it was more than 20. i can't remember the exact number but there was just quite a few of them squashed all in there together and they explained as they were standing there on the street in vent louisiana with their car drove into the tree that the lord had told them to do this which of course increased the astonishment of the police of louisiana even more and so i'm addressing this phenomenon by saying you know i do not believe it was the lord who told them to do that there is this fellow who runs around impersonating the lord and many times people tell you god told me to do this but it's that fellow who impersonates the lord it's not the lord at all it's a real problem i find that all too often especially those guys have you noticed how often people who used to be television weathermen now run for public office they all have really good hair and no brains now i don't mean to put down weatherman as a class but i'm sure there are redeeming uh exceptions among the weathermen of the nation but i just am speaking of a common kind of weatherman um i find more and more that people who go into politics seem to me to somehow they don't have much depth they don't have much fire they they um lord only knows what makes them run was a remarkable week in my life when um a bunch of texas lunatics holed up out by fort davis texas and demanded that texas be allowed to secede from the rest of the country and it touched off quite a media storm around the world and as the resident authority on texas lunatics there i was getting telephone calls from places like bombay besides these bombay times calling can you explain please the people in the fort davis and i was yeah i can explain them they are just crazier than house rats

Channel: retox44

Views: 15,380

Rating: 4.8951964 out of 5

Keywords: unintentional, asmr, molly, ivins, interview, excerpts, edited, out, interviewer, brian, lamb, cspan, politics, texan, dance, them, brung, you, got, to, soft, spoken, voice, relaxing, relax, mouth, sounds, funny, humorous, humor, comedy, writer, columnist, accent, texas, being, book

Id: umssQ0np6Vo

Length: 43min 31sec (2611 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020