Today is Molly Ivins’s birthday, and when we finally make this a more just world, it will become a national holiday. As it is, we’ll keep celebrating it right here at Wonkette and do what we can to keep alive the spirit of Texas’s greatest contribution to American humor and political commentary. She’d have been 73 today, and while we don’t believe in an afterlife, we sure understand the impulse, because it’s a goddamned shame Molly missed the last election, which would have left her whomperjawed. If someday we wake up in an Elysian field where she and Ann Richards are drinking and cutting loose with profane observations on doings back on Earth, we’ll be very happy to have been wrong.

We’re less sure about wishing she were here to help us get through the term of President Weirdhair, though. God knows we could use her, but we’re unclear on the morality of asking a soul to exchange the peace of the grave for a republic being torn apart by a man who makes Shrub Bush look statesmanlike by comparison. But she might get a kick out of it.

We are not inclined to think the universe has a proper sense of fun or fairness, given the simple fact that we lost Gilda Radner at 42 and Molly Ivins at 62, while Henry Kissinger still walks this earth at the age of 94 and has so far escaped prosecution for war crimes. And let’s all just say one more time, together, “Fuck cancer.”

There’s never a bad time to quote Molly Ivins, so let’s light some birthday candles, have some of those cakes we like, and remember a woman with a unique talent for looking at public idiocy, holding it up to the light, and blowing it to rags and atoms with a few words:

*All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don’t think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it’s all marvelous fun.

*There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity — like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule — that’s what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.