SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Running on His Rims Ah, such rich and delicious times for those who relish political uproar, for followers of fallout, connoisseurs of cover-up, wallowers of every stripe...
...I'll say this for Bill Clements: At least he remembers doing it...
...I'm just trying to be helpful here...
...Lest you be filled with wonder at this remarkable interpretation, let me explain that Governor Clements's grasp of the language is both infirm and eccentric...
...We need some pep in discussion of the Presidential dimness...
...In fact, the main reason we can't pass one of those laws making English the official language down here is that if we did, we'd have to deport the governor, along with most of the rest of our state officials...
...I have been collecting euphemisms used on television to suggest that our only President is so dumb that if you put his brains in a bee, it would fly backwards...
...This clearifies the whole thang...
...He also hopes the NCAA will secede in stopping it and commensurates with 'em on the difficulty of doing it...
...Ronald Reagan's dysfunctional memory caused Letterman to wonder what else the President might have forgotten...
...According to combined American, French, and Israeli intelligence sources, the $50,000 check that went to the "fixer" in that bombing was cashed at the Iranian embassy in Damascus...
...How about, "He's walkin' around dead and don't know enough to lie down...
...Couldn't pour water out of a boot if the instructions was on the heel...
...The best people...
...The time has come once more to ask this painfully obvious question, whether CBS is ready for it or not...
...I will put a stop to it...
...Reagan would be perfect saying, "I'm not a President...
...Their contention is that it's a splendid style—choose the best people and let them do as they think best—and needs only a slightly more "hands-on" approach...
...SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Running on His Rims Ah, such rich and delicious times for those who relish political uproar, for followers of fallout, connoisseurs of cover-up, wallowers of every stripe and persuasion...
...While Sam Donaldson has waxed sarcastic and George Will has been annoyed by it all, Dan Rather suffers chagrin and Peter Jennings looks worried, the only television commentator on the money has been David Letterman, who observed plaintively, "I thought you never forgot your first arms shipment to the Ayatol-lah...
...I like the Reagan faithful who defend his "poor management style" (another euphemism for "a few brick shy of a load...
...Confused," "detached," "disengaged," "befuddled," "lazy," and "sedated" (that was Edwin Meese's) are a few of the genteelisms in common use—all of them downtown dull...
...Watergate for observing, "The President is the dead mouse on the floor of American politics, and the only question left is who is going to pick him up and carry him out of the room...
...I said I was going to, that I would...
...Fishin' with a rotten line and an empty hook...
...How sweet it is...
...Cross-threaded between the ears...
...The unfortunate misimpression that our governor had been lying about the SMU football scandal for quite a long time was finally corrected when he explained, "Well, there never was a Bible present...
...If you ever have to deal with him, just be sure you take the Good Book along...
...All of them are guilty of illegalities, improprieties, or simple loopiness...
...Don't know com'on from sic'em...
...But I play one on TV...
...And bringing his mother's grave might help too...
...Don't have all his oars in the water...
...I especially appreciated the Grammatical Defense: At one point, Clements claimed that the National Collegiate Athletic Association had known all along that SMU was continuing to pay its players because he, Bill Clements, the noted language scholar, had told the NCAA, "I will clean this up...
...He don't know nothin' and has that all tangled up...
...Marines he had sent to Lebanon...
...Where he left the Seventh Fleet...
...Here are some others: "You can look in his eyes, but there's nobody home...
...But I play one on TV," and then proceeds to give us advice about cold remedies...
...The words to "Happy Birthday...
...Nick Von Hoffman was fired by CBS during Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...I did not say I had done it...
...Speaking of illegalities, improprieties, and loopiness, you knew I was going to get around to my governor, didn't you...
...Whether he's put out enough dry food and water for the Vice President...
...No amount of hands-on is going to help a man who would choose Oliver North, John Poindexter, Donald Regan, William Casey, James Watt, Michael Deaver, Edwin Meese, Patrick Buchanan, Paul Thayer, Richard Allen, Rita Lavelle, Anne Burford, Richard Perle, Charles Wick, William French Smith—one could go on and on—to run the country...
...You know perfectly well that's the future tense...
...Yes, in August 1985, our Bill was deciding, with the help of the cream of the Dallas Establishment, to continue making illegal payments to Southern Methodist University football players, even though the school had just been put on probation for doing same...
...Perhaps the most difficult question in American politics today is why anyone is still taking Ronald Reagan seriously...
...One thing Reagan rather clearly forgot was the involvement of Iranians in the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S...
...Running on his rims...
...Now you people are all writers...
...And lest you think the governor of Texas approves of paying football players, he says the practice is "repungent to me...
...Reagan is so much a creature of the tube that a couple of great minds came up with the same happy thought: Ida Frankel of New York and the comedian David Steinberg both observed that he belongs in a series of ads with the slick-haired fellow in the white coat who comes on and says, "I'm not a doctor...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
