SMALL FAVORS
Lvins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Back in the Tall Cotton Well, here we all were, thinking we'd never, ever have as much fun again with Ronald Reagan gone from Washington City and within days—days!—we...
...Next, Bush said it wasn't a tax, it was just like the entrance fee at Yosemite...
...I was at the Inauguration, standing in the middle of that forest of mink coats on Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...Okay, so we'll have to meet in the football stadium...
...But consider, if we bail out the S&Ls with our little upward adjustment in existing premium practices, they'll have to give us the same deal they've been giving the big bail-out boys...
...he may even have been a hero...
...Hasn't even been President a week and already he's out of the loop...
...Admit it, this team is already up to Reagan standards...
...But Bush doesn't do homework and he hasn't enough imagination to question his own assumptions...
...Deep down, he's shallow...
...That's beyond stupid and into sick...
...The Washington press corps is ecstatic to have a President who can stay awake, so they have all but declared Bush the greatest ruler since Augustus Caesar...
...Manuel Lujan for Interior...
...Richard Nixon went to China, you know...
...We'll all be on the loan committee...
...John Tower for Defense: Ah, how shrewd, says the corps...
...John Sununu announced the thing was not a duck, it was "an upward adjustment in existing premium practices...
...SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Back in the Tall Cotton Well, here we all were, thinking we'd never, ever have as much fun again with Ronald Reagan gone from Washington City and within days—days!—we were back to choppin' in the tall cotton...
...Jack Kemp for HUD, said Bush, and they all applauded as though having Kemp in charge of housing were not a cruel joke...
...That kinder, gentler stuff is so good, next time let's skip the middleman and elect his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan...
...These Bush people have some great ideas...
...He truly does have lovely manners—I always feel his mother should be congratulated...
...So much for Richard Darman, the new budget director, who insisted at his confirmation hearings that "if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck...
...That had the effect of a skunk in the churchhouse...
...He is a man forever rooted in Greenwich, Connecticut, World War II, and the assumption that everyone went to dancing school...
...The big boys put up around $300 million and then Danny Wall and FSLIC, the S&L insurance company, put up $6 billion and turned control over to the big boys...
...They now do penance by overestimating him, greeting his every move with applause and wonder...
...Before Reagan and all his merry men are mercifully obliterated from memory, I'd like to thank one of them, George Shultz, who always seemed to me to be an extremely decent man who worked hard and did good, right up to the end...
...That's the kind of thing we expected from Ronald Reagan, and now it's applauded from Bush...
...Besides, it's a great idea and I fully support it...
...the Capitol lawn while Bush promised a kinder, gentler nation...
...Except for Nancy Reagan, can you think of anyone less likely...
...World War II was fifty years ago...
...But when the Rip-Off Greedsharks Real Estate Development Company, Inc., shows up looking for a loan to run up a fancy mall and subdivision that will ruin two lakes, one river, and an aquifer, we can all vote "NO...
...Bush benefits, of course, from comparisons with his predecessor, who not only was a dodo but also snoozed through a staggering amount of corruption...
...Munich and Pearl Harbor are important lessons...
...Manuel Lujan to defend the environment...
...William Bennett for drug czar...
...Bush also benefits from the fact that the Washington press corps underestimated him all last year...
...I felt like the Grinch at the festivities, on account of long observation of Bush has left me with a low opinion of him...
...You say you'll be damned if you'll pay for the privilege of saving your own money just to bail out the gotch-eyed, egg-sucking crooks and fools who bankrupted the S&Ls...
...Under this excellent scheme, for every $5 of "premium adjustment" we pay, we'll get $83 of FSLIC's money plus control of the bank...
...I hope someone writes a good book about him...
...First, the new Treasury guy, Nicholas Brady, floats the rumor they're fixing to bail out the S&Ls by taxing everybody's savings account...
...George Bush denied he knew anything about it: Great...
...When Joe Don and Verda Mae Billups, both hard workers, two kids, stand up and ask for a mortgage loan, we'll all vote aye...
...Sununu was as dumb a pick as Dan Quayle...
...But so are Saigon and Beirut, Santiago and Teheran...
...His best quality, in my view, is that incurable tendency toward moments of transcendent dorkiness...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
