4.0
Bill of Wrongs
ByPublisher Description
Throughout her long career of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” the cause closest to Molly Ivins’s heart was working to protect the freedoms we all value. Sadly, today we’re living in a time when dissent is equated with giving aid to terrorists, when any of us can be held in prison without even knowing the charges against us, and when our constitutional rights are being interpreted by a president who calls himself “The Decider.”
Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs while touring America to honor her promise to speak out, gratis, at least once a month in defense of free speech. In her travels Ivins met ordinary people going to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most precious liberties, and when she first started writing this book, she intended it to be a joyous celebration of those heroes. But during the Bush years, the project’s focus changed. Ivins became concerned about threats to our cherished freedoms–among them the Patriot Act and the weakening of habeas corpus–and she observed with anger how dissent in the defense of liberties was being characterized as treason by the Bush administration and its enablers.
From illegal wiretaps, the unlawful imprisonment of American citizens, and the undermining of freedom of the press to the creeping influence of religious extremism on our national agenda and the erosion of the checks and balances that prevent a president from seizing unitary powers, Ivins and her longtime collaborator, Lou Dubose, co-author of Shrub and Bushwacked, describe the attack on America’s vital constitutional guarantees. With devastating humor and keen eyes for deceit and hypocrisy, they show how severe these incursions have become, and they ask us all to take an active role in protecting the Bill of Rights.
In life and on the printed page, Molly Ivins was too cool to offer a posthumous valedictory (or even to take a victory lap for her many triumphs over inane, vainglorious, and addlepated politicos). But in Bill of Wrongs, her final and perhaps greatest book, the irrepressible Molly Ivins really does have the last word.
Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs while touring America to honor her promise to speak out, gratis, at least once a month in defense of free speech. In her travels Ivins met ordinary people going to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most precious liberties, and when she first started writing this book, she intended it to be a joyous celebration of those heroes. But during the Bush years, the project’s focus changed. Ivins became concerned about threats to our cherished freedoms–among them the Patriot Act and the weakening of habeas corpus–and she observed with anger how dissent in the defense of liberties was being characterized as treason by the Bush administration and its enablers.
From illegal wiretaps, the unlawful imprisonment of American citizens, and the undermining of freedom of the press to the creeping influence of religious extremism on our national agenda and the erosion of the checks and balances that prevent a president from seizing unitary powers, Ivins and her longtime collaborator, Lou Dubose, co-author of Shrub and Bushwacked, describe the attack on America’s vital constitutional guarantees. With devastating humor and keen eyes for deceit and hypocrisy, they show how severe these incursions have become, and they ask us all to take an active role in protecting the Bill of Rights.
In life and on the printed page, Molly Ivins was too cool to offer a posthumous valedictory (or even to take a victory lap for her many triumphs over inane, vainglorious, and addlepated politicos). But in Bill of Wrongs, her final and perhaps greatest book, the irrepressible Molly Ivins really does have the last word.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesBill of Wrongs Reviews
4.0
BookCrazyLady45
Created almost 4 years agoShare
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“This is one scary book. Looking back at one's own feelings during the period she describes is mind blowing. I remember so many hinky things and wondering how Bush and Cheney were able to get away with it. I remember so many suspicious things, so many warnings but all fragmented and sound bites and gut feelings....it was the tip of the iceberg drifting into the path of the Titanic. USA today is the Titanic and is on a direct collision course with the iceberg Molly Ivins described in this book. It is beyond sick making how the damaging things the Republicans have done to the country they claim to love have during each succeeding administration since Nixon has been like building blocks of fascism till the pyramid will have a dictator at its head and no single American will have any rights (as guaranteed by their Constitution) except to work themselves to an early grave to pay taxes with no rights or protections under the law from their own government or their police. Beyond frightening. I feel like Chicken Little...the sky is falling. I wish Molly were here to report what is happening but like Cassandra...they did not listen back then and they would not listen now.”
Rick Wilson
Created over 5 years agoShare
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“Over a decade old and this still holds up as a blood boiling depiction of the strip mining of our civil liberties. Among other things, an examination of the patriot act as a singular document where a frightened United States populous agreed to the Faustian bargain of giving up many of their privacy rights for safety. In the hope that post 9/11 it would make them safer. However, the agencies given this newfangled power and many growing pains that resulted in the infringement in developing of new norms around what is acceptable for the treatment of their citizens”
Jennifer Bunnell
Created over 7 years agoShare
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Jennifer B.
Created over 12 years agoShare
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isopod sal
Created over 17 years agoShare
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“My first inkling that Bush's administration wasn't simply running things differently than I would, or that Bush was simply annoying, but that they were doing scary things. Love Molly's "voice."”
About Molly Ivins
Molly Ivins, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, began her career in journalism as the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She then went on to work for The Texas Observer, as co-editor, and The New York Times, as a political reporter and later as Rocky Mountain bureau chief. In 1982, she returned to Texas. Her column was syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, and her freelance work appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s, and other publications. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books with Lou Dubose on George W. Bush, Shrub and Bushwhacked, were also New York Times bestsellers. Molly Ivins died in January 2007.
Lou Dubose has written about Texas and national politics for thirty years. He was editor of The Texas Observer and politics editor for The Austin Chronicle, and he currently edits The Washington Spectator. He was co-author (with Molly Ivins) of Shrub and Bushwhacked. In 2003 he wrote (with Texas Monthly writer Jan Reid) The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress. In 2006 he wrote (with Texas Observer editor Jake Bernstein) Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.
Lou Dubose has written about Texas and national politics for thirty years. He was editor of The Texas Observer and politics editor for The Austin Chronicle, and he currently edits The Washington Spectator. He was co-author (with Molly Ivins) of Shrub and Bushwhacked. In 2003 he wrote (with Texas Monthly writer Jan Reid) The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress. In 2006 he wrote (with Texas Observer editor Jake Bernstein) Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.
Other books by Molly Ivins
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