You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You : Politics in the Clinton Years

by Molly Ivins | Humor |
ISBN: 0679404465 Global Overview for this book
Registered by abs of Seattle, Washington USA on 10/14/2005
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4 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by abs from Seattle, Washington USA on Friday, October 14, 2005
This is my partner's book, but he's too lazy to register it on bookcrossing. He is willyreadbook.
He loved this book and wants to pass it on to others in a bookray. So I will be organizing that.
I would read it, but I don't have time. Someday a copy will fall into my hands when I have time.
In the meantime- enjoy.

Beckerbuns (CA)
Bunrab (MD)
Synergy (TX)

Released 18 yrs ago (11/5/2005 UTC) at Postal Release in Sent To The Next Bookcrosser, Bookray -- Controlled Releases

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Journal Entry 3 by beckerbuns from Los Gatos, California USA on Monday, January 2, 2006
This book arrived on Saturday. Holy cow, it took a long time to get here. But it is now safe in my hands. It's the book I'm reading next -- starting today.

Thanks for sharing!

Journal Entry 4 by beckerbuns from Los Gatos, California USA on Sunday, February 12, 2006
I finished this one a week ago. Molly Ivins is very funny, as usual!!!

The book is off to bunrab tomorrow. Hopefully it will move faster now. Thank you for your patience!

Released 18 yrs ago (2/13/2006 UTC) at media mail in sent to the the next bookcrosser, Bookray -- Controlled Releases

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Off to bunrab, the next person.

Journal Entry 6 by BunRab from Owings Mills, Maryland USA on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Received in the mail today. I've got one book ahead of it in line, and then I'll read it and my spouse will read it - figure a week to ten days total before it's ready to go to the next person.

Journal Entry 7 by synergy from San Antonio, Texas USA on Tuesday, May 30, 2006
This book came in the mail today. I'm getting avalanched with books at the moment and as a matter of fact another book came in the mail at the same time. I'll get to it as soon as I can, but it might be a couple of weeks before I can get to it.

Journal Entry 8 by synergy from San Antonio, Texas USA on Saturday, July 1, 2006
2006 Book #18 - You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years by Molly Ivins

It was so refreshing to read this book after my #17, American Theocracy! I mean, the Clinton years were when I grew up, the end of my high school years and the beginning of my college years. Compared to the things that have gone on in the last 5, the sheer innocence (in comparison) is astonishing. It was definitely a nice nostalgia trip down memory lane. The book is mainly a compilation of articles Ivins wrote for several different papers and journals mostly around 1994 to 1997. Topics such as welfare reform and different articles where good old Newt Gingrich was being the hypocritical pest he was are very "dated," but I found it interesting how much of what she wrote about then was just like today's politics or some of it even the beginnings of some of the awful stuff happening today.

It was already beginning that there was all that misdirection and misquoting, taking things out of context and twisting them them into something negative and then harping on it until no one will ever find out the complete, positive message. For example there was a person in the Clinton admin, Rivlin, who wrote a memo which contained several ways to cut the deficit while still having things like job skills programs. Among those ways was cutting Social Security benefits to rich people. Next thing they knew Gingrich was waving the memo around and saying how Clinton wanted to cut SS as though it was going to be cut for ALL people, not just the rich. Of course not surprisingly when the Republicans took over Congress one of the things they did was to attempt to cut the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) because, according to these drama queens, people were forging papers, faking diseases, and even getting their kids to fake illnesses and abuse. My family was on SS and SSI and let me tell you, it was no Golden Ticket! Sure, we knew of people faking stuff because they were too lazy to work, but the majority of those we knew were hard-working people who needed a little supplemental help. Their biggest complaint was that there was ever-increasing numbers of people going on SSI. Only they didn't stop to detail that the reason there was an uptick on annual enrollments was because they'd been gumming up the works the years before and making it difficult or at least making it take forever before an application was finally accepted. Once someone got on them about it, all the backlog had to be made up. Ivins says at one point, "Politics in this country isn't about left and right it's about up and down. The few are screwing the many." (That was in 1994.) Yes, just another non-issue actually created by crazies.

Speaking of crazies, even then they were starting to be a problem. Censorship attempts left and right like now on what words are acceptable to say and write and what smut isn't allowed on t.v. Something I found hilarious was that in early 1994 something called the MMPI, "the diagnostic tool used by psychologists", was used to determine who's allowed to own a gun. Two behavior patterns they used to screen out people was "rule-breaking in a way that can and often does lead to criminal behavior and...fundamentalism." No, they didn't specify people from the middle east or other countries, just fundamentalism. That includes the little cults like Koresh's and big ones like the ones that have t.v. shows and build "churches" to hold 10,000 people. At one point Ivins writes an article that discusses how some American terrorists exist, especially those that love to bomb abortion clinics. But even then there were the people who were apologizing for them because they respected their "passion." Uh huh. Ivins goes into a whole rant about how these Christian fundamentalists love to say that the Founding Fathers were Christians, untrue since they were Deists (modern-day Unitarians) and humanists. "Religious zealots are nothing new in our political life, but cutting them slack because of the perfervidness of their beliefs is perfect folly. It is precisely their zealotry, their unwillingness to compromise, and their intolerance that makes them unfit for political office." (1994) Hear hear!

None of this is apparently new. Every year it seems the ACLU breaks out the lawsuits whenever someone decides to put a manger and whatnot around Christmas or ginormous crosses on public land and all sorts of people try to make them look like bad guys because they want some of that good old separation of church and state. The people who want it to be believed that it's right of might to have these things in public like to muddle the issue by saying that there's no knowing what was the Founding Fathers' purpose over "separation of church and state." But Ivins pulls out a useful quote where James Madison clearly states why exactly, "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries." Because religion is kept so much out of the "public square" is why it's little stuff like whether or not there should be a baby Jesus on the Town Hall lawn rather than constantly having yet one more religious item imposed upon minorities repeatedly until they can't take it anymore and war breaks out. It's when politicians jump in on the act and, as Ivins calls it, start impersonating God that it goes overboard. I found this hilarious: "I think the Texas Lege should pass a bill making impersonatin' the Lord a felony and then we should have a kind of neighborhood watch, with everyone callin' in suspected cases of Lord impersonation to the Texas Rangers. I don't see why God should take the blame when preachers or citizens claim they've heard from him and then say somethin' idiotic." LOL

Unfortunately it's the people who would love to distract from their power grabs, be they rich or religious or both (although how you can truly be both, I don't know) that Ivins points out that even then people were running around getting angry about what today we call the non-issues. Whether the U.N. is out to take away our sovereignity, whether or not immigrants are trying to take over the country or its wealth, etc while not getting angry over the truly important stuff like (at the time) who was guilty in the S&L scandals, who's shutting down factories, who's putting people out of work, why there's so many poor people, etc. etc. Ivins in a 1997 article rightly says "hold your fire, and your anger, for those who have power. Wasting it on imaginary threats or powerless people is wasting a valuable national resource [anger]." Actually, I suppose it's some more of misdirection, what Ivins called "the Big Lie technique" in a 1995 article. In relation to Gingrich, "if he keeps associating horrible tragedies with liberalism and welfare, some people are bound to accept the association without thinking about it." This technique keeps happening and apparently keeps on working. Today one can't say the word "liberal" without even liberals themselves associating it with something bad. Supposedly being conservative is the way to go and yet if you compare numbers Ivins gives for Clinton in the depths of all the "crises" years to today's numbers of Bush Jr. they just don't compare. According to Ivins Clinton kept 60 to 70% of the promises he made during his campaign! And you know that politicians never promise bad things because otherwise they don't get elected! I'd like to know how much of what Bush promised he's actually kept.

Speaking of Bush campaigning, at the time I didn't pay as much attention to politics, but apparently Bush won in Texas against a well-liked governer, Ann Richards, with the very same tactics he's used over and over again: god, gays, and guns. Richards was accused of filling government positions with gays, exaggerations were made of her veto of a bill allowing concealed weapons to the point where people were thinking she was going to come take their weapons, and of course it's against god for anyone to be gay in addition to the god-given right of owning a gun. Good grief! This guy apparently has no new tricks and yet they keep working over and over! Even the fudging of voting ballots was tried and true in Texas. Apparently because our state has no state income tax, military people who lived here at some point training in the state's many boot camps/bases still give their address as Texas so they don't have to pay state taxes and to boot they get a voting ballot. Only military people "living" in Texas are only supposed to vote in federal elections, not local ones. Guess what group of people helped give the victory of Governor to George W. Bush? *sigh*

There's always someone out to make people like that into saints though. I was just shaking my head at one article in which Ivins talks about Nixon's funeral and how everyone holds him up as the perfect politician, all while conveniently forgetting all the crap he did (including resigning to avoid impeachment!) and being what a close aide (Ivins writes) knew him to be, "Dirty, mean, coldly calculating, devious, craftily manipulative, the weirdest man ever to live in the White House." I thought the same thing of Nixon at the time and the claim of sainthood happened again when Ronald Reagan died too. But among these people is what Ivins rails against often that the crazies (today's Republicans) want to do: "You can't get a decent deal with people who don't want the government to work. The Shiite Republicans aren't interested in fixing government - they want to destroy it." These were the people who slowly took over Congress and today are well on their way to trashing the government like Ivins says in that 1997 article.

I'll end in a semi-hilarous note on something Ivins notes which holds up the recurring theme that the more things change, the more things remain the same: "an unfortunate moment in George W. Bush's gubernatorial campaign: Bush went dove-hunting, an obligatory photo op to Texas pols, and proudly showed off his kill - a protected bird called the killdee." (1994) Well, not everyone can be right on the ethics and taking-out skills as, say, Jessica "Decca" Treuhaft, muckraker of the funeral industry! Some of them have to be the Cheneys of the world... :D

A lovely exercise in nostalgia. Thanks for lending me this book!

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