> The thing about Molly Ivins is that she is clever--even funny (sometimes I laugh even as she's making my blood boil). She's able to disguise her lack of supporting evidence with biting sarcasm and an excellent command of the English language.

I like Molly Ivins, because I saw her on TV once and she was a delightful speaker. Her voice is awful, but she really is quite skilled at speaking. She manages to fix the audience's attention to her words. On the other hand, she's a lousy writer. Writing requires very different skills from speaking, most importantly because there is no room for contentless text, while vapid but rhetorically powerful speech is the political ideal. The local newspaper prints Ivins' columns, and in all but one that I have read, she gets general facts curiously wrong before the end of the first sentence. Don't worry about reasonableness--it's just not to be found. If you read Ivins' writing, do so trying to figure out her top-quality rhetorical technique.

Ga"The best university newspapers are the parodies."be