SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins What About Apple Pie? I always resent people who wave the flag while spitting on the Constitution," Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire said during the Iran-contra...
...The only thing different is that every year they get better at what they do...
...Roger Ailes, Bush's top media adviser, is the same guy who was the central figure in Joe McGinniss's book, The Selling of the President, 1968...
...No one has ever claimed that the guys in the Texas legislature are a bunch of rocket scientists, much less soft on drugs, but even they finally repealed the state's insane penalties for drug use because they didn't work and because they cost the state a blinding amount of money...
...If you're serious about national leadership, you learn how Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...The folks running the Bush campaign have been electing Republican presidents for twenty years now...
...These are the people who introduced the principles of Madison Avenue to politics...
...If totalitarianism comes to this country, it will surely do so in the guise of 100 per cent Americanism," Huey Long is supposed to have said...
...How long will George Bush continue to wrap himself in the flag...
...Like George Bush, you learn how to lower your voice, change your body language, dye your hair, wear makeup, control your eye movements—whatever it takes...
...Deaver's dictum is, "Television elects Presidents...
...The House drug bill, passed in a tuff-on-drugs frenzy, would levy $10,000 fines against marijuana users...
...So getting elected president is 95 per cent show biz these days...
...Meanwhile, we know there's an election coming up because Congress is doing some spectacularly dumb but popular things, as well as displaying even more cowardice than usual...
...And someone did a poll showing that the nightly network news is eight times more important than any other factor in a Presidential race...
...What is wrong with these people...
...The story is on the RCA record The Wit of Adlai Stevenson, narrated by David Brinkley, as well as in several anthologies of political humor...
...President Adlai Stevenson never governed here...
...Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha...
...After the television folks had left, Bush stayed to chat with some local reporters and introduced them to the guy who actually drives the tractor for a living...
...to do it...
...During a campaign photo opportunity in Florida in late September, Bush put on a hard hat and drove a caterpillar tractor around for the media...
...Stevenson enjoyed telling it: He got it from Lindy Boggs, whose late husband Hale liked to tell it...
...Now we've declared war op all use of drugs in America...
...Stealing material from Adlai Stevenson at least shows some taste...
...The Bush advance team is the same bunch of spin artistes Michael Deaver put together for Reagan...
...I always resent people who wave the flag while spitting on the Constitution," Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire said during the Iran-contra hearings, "and that's what I think some people are doing around here...
...Driving home that night he asked his wife, "Marilyn, how many great, great, great Americans do you think there are...
...The fundamental laws of Madison Avenue are keep the message simple and repeat it often...
...That Quayle steals from Al Gore is all you need to know about Dan the Deke...
...He's taken to telling a story about how one time he was introduced at some dinner as "a great, great, great American...
...But Quayle stole it from Albert Gore, who went around using it in the primaries this spring...
...However, J. Danforth Quayle continues to distinguish himself...
...Mickey, pal, in the Great State of Texas, until 1973, first-offense possession—not sale, just possession—of any amount of marijuana was a felony that carried a sentence of two years to life imprisonment...
...They gave us Richard Nixon twice and Ronald Reagan twice...
...Here we are drawing to the close of the Presidential campaign and we're still stuck on the flag, when neither apple pie nor motherhood has yet been addressed by the candidates...
...Cute, the wife puts him down when he gets swell-headed...
...That's crap...
...As long as the polls say it's working...
...Still, even the greatest publicists can't conceal the essential twit in George Bush...
...It's creepy that the sucker issue of the Pledge of Allegiance plays in this country, but it's even creepier that Dukakis had such a hard time figuring out how to handle it...
...Catering to the National Rifle Association on the Brady Amendment was but one of several recent revolting developments...
...I predict high school sophomores will have a hard time coming up with the 10 K. Some idiot named Mickey Edwards, a Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, was quoted as saying, "We never did anything about the casual users before...
...Said the Veep enthusiastically, "I want you to meet the fellow who taught me everything I know about vibrators...
...Elevated discussion of public issues has always boiled down to, "Ma, ma, where's my pa...
...who figured out you could govern the country with public relations...
...And she said, "Not as many as you think, buddy boy...
...Maybe someday Congress will get to be as smart as the Texas legislature...
...Progressives are expected to sit shiva over all this, mourning the corrupting influence of the tube and the debasing effect of advertising and public relations on our once-noble public life...
Vol. 52 • November 1988 • No. 11
