Most liberals sneer, grate, whine, scream, and picket, but Molly Ivins chuckles wisely and smiles tiredly so everyone will regard her as a lovable cynic.

The Texas columnist describes herself as “a left-wing, aging-Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn’t even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.” Actually her professional Good Ole Girl number is far more interesting than mere lesbianism. An occasional commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, she bellies up to the gourmet crackerbarrel and delivers laid-back wisdom with the serenity of a down-home Buddha who has discovered that stool softeners really work. Watching her go through her paces is like watching Ona Munson, who played Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind, doing an imitation of Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind. That’s a lot of wind.

Besides her newspaper column, Ivins writes for MS., Mother Jones, The Progressive, Rolling Stone, and The Nation. This has given her enough material for two collections: Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (named for the incensed Dallas advertisers who tried to censor her), and Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead.

She rounds up the usual sentiments. On guns: “Ban the damn things. Ban them all.” On bilingualism: “It’s racist for any Texas reporter south of Lubbock not to be able to speak Spanish.” Cutting capital gains is “the dumbest kind of tax subsidy to conspicuous consumption.” Pat Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech “probably sounded better in the original German,” and gays move her to trite Freudianism: “Hating them seems to be a function of being afraid that you might be one yourself.”

She’s funny on the Texas legislature’s mangled English (“Disperse with the objections”), but she ruins it with an earnest tribute to Barbara Jordan, who, being black and female, gets credit for “eloquence.” Jordan actually took her oratorical pretensions from the Saxon Witenagemot, which is why she sounds like Alfred the Great with lockjaw.

Ivins’ own English ranges from politically correct (“yeoperson”) to Texanese (“bidness” for business, “Meskin” for Mexican) to hokeynyms (“our foundin’ daddies were about the smartest sumbitches ever walked”). She scatters the text with “Sheesh!” and “Well, poop!” and lots of “y’alls,” and practices multiculturalism complete with Yiddish misspellings (“the pièce de résistance of the whole schmear”).

She also knows how to gild a lily, as I discovered in the following passage:

In her definitive work, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, Florence King observes, “The cult of southern womanhood…requires [a female] to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, animated, and scatterbrained all at the same time…. A horrifying number of us succeed, which accounts for that popular southern female pastime, having a nervous breakdown.”

The passage as I wrote it reads: “She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at the same time. Her problems spring from the fact that she succeeds.” Add a l’il more on there, honey, give the folks they money’s worth.

This tarted-up quotation from my 1975 book appears in Ivins’ 1988 Mother Jones article, “Magnolias and Moonshine.” My name is strewn through this article, but never where it counts. She credits me on minor observations, but when the subject is politics—her turf—she plagiarizes me.

IVINS: “Keep in mind that Southerners are so conservative they voted for Franklin Roosevelt, so isolationist they voted for Richard Nixon, so populist they voted for Barry Goldwater, so aristocratic they voted for George Wallace, and that they see nothing peculiar in any of this.”

KING: “The typical Southerner:

—Brags about what a conservative he is and then votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

—Or brags about what an isolationist he is and then votes for Richard Nixon.

—Or brags about what a populist he is and then votes for Barry Goldwater.

—Or brags about what an aristocrat he is and then votes for George Wallace.

—And is able to say with a straight face that he sees nothing peculiar about any of the above.”

IVINS: “The Southern passion for military service first astonished the rest of the country in 1898, when Southerners signed up in droves to avenge the Maine. It was the country’s first war since Appomattox, and for 33 years Yankees had questioned Southern loyalty.”

KING: “In 1898, the phenomenon that surprised Americans nearly as much as the explosion of the battleship Maine was the vast number of Southern men who answered the call to the colors. It was America’s first war since Appomattox, and Southern loyalty had been in question for 33 years.”

Danged if this don’t remind me of an old left-wing quotation: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”