Molly ivins journalist biography of albert
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Paging John le Carré; come in, Mr. le Carré; we still need you on the spy beat. In fact, we need you more than ever because the latest spy scandal is an unholy example of what happens when the national security apparatus, stuck with nothing to do and desperate to justify its budget, finds a way to use credulous media people to whomp up a spy scare.
Only you, George Smiley, could untangle the bureaucratic maneuvering behind this mess, although you would think (wouldn’t you?) that even the simplest minds in the media would recognize the political motive behind the Republican effort to start a spy stampede. But no. “Chinese Scientist at Los Alamos Is Spy Suspect,” trumpet our most reliable organs of communication. Columnist William Safire of The New York Times, who has reverted to full-blown Cold War hysteria, even brags that the “much-maligned media” deserve credit for bringing this grave situation to our attention. Actually, the media deserve to be maligned out the wazoo over this. Look at their sources on this mess: a classic disgruntled former employee of the Department of Energy, a retired head of C.I.A. counterintelligence, and a bunch of leaky Republicans on some fool spy-hunt committee on the Hill. When will they ever learn?
Here’s th
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Talk:Molly Ivins
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Somehow this white-washing of Ivins' anti-Nazism trapped around since 2012. Looking for work is apparently false. I revertedJairuscobb (
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I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."
I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I hadn't ever noticed this phenomenon before, but others must have. So while "a reverence for power" is fine, for me "an irreverence for power" is ungrammatical, though cute, and certainly understandable, and maybe it was intentionally tongue in cheek — after all, they had just been discussing the slogan "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?", which her editors had put on billboards to defend her and which became the title of one of her books.
Similarly, I can say "a passion for politics", but I can't say "a dispassion for politics".
Well, I should check Google. … Hmm, supportive, to some extent, but not conclusive.
— "a reverence for" – 185,000, vs. "an irreverence for" – 1600, about a 100-to-1 difference. But just plain "reverence" vs "irreverence" gets 8,990,000 vs. 825, 000, about a 10-to-1 difference. So "an irreverence for" is indeed much rarer, but not as impossible for everyone as I