As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.

As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years.

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.

Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented.

Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant - it tends to get worse.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.

'Get along, go along' is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash 'em in for your home state? No, I'd say we could ask for more than that from our senators.

'The New York Times' is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.

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.

All my life, I've been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I'd get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it's not happening.

Am I the only person covering politics who ever noticed that Newt Gingrich is actually a nincompoop?

And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.

Anyone who has ever spent time listening to a legislature knows the astonishing speed at which all presiding officers and reading clerks can spit out the formulaic incantations of parliamentary procedure.

Anyone who watched George W. and Karl Rove while the former was governor of Texas will recognize a familiar pattern. Like much of Bush's social policy - from faith-based social services to railing against gay marriage - women's issues are one of the bones they've decided they can throw to the Christian right.

Arkansas, the state Bill Clinton loves and that loves him back, is a place with just no pretension at all.

As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic shih tzus in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.

Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.

Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.

Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.

Don't get me started about the media double standard.

Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.

Even after four years in office, George W. Bush's record on women doesn't leap out at you. It's composed almost entirely of little things, small enough to fly well under the media's radar screen, so few of us have any sense of their cumulative impact.

Even for southerners, Arkansans are amazingly friendly and extend hospitality to all strangers with astonishing openness. You couldn't find a pretension in that state if you hunted from Jonesboro to El Dorado.

For years, I have been trying to persuade people that George W. Bush, although no Einstein, is not stupid.

Fourteen-year-old boys are not part of a well-regulated militia. Members of wacky religious cults are not part of a well-regulated militia. Permitting unregulated citizens to have guns is destroying the security of this free state.

From orphanages to space colonies, it was all shallow but endearingly enthusiastic futurism. Gingrich was the kind of person who read a book or two on something and would then be quite afire as to how this was going to fit into some shining future.

Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.

Havin' fun while freedom fightin' must be one of those lunatic Texas traits we get from the water - which is known to have lithium in it - because it goes all the way back to Sam Houston, surely the most lovable, the most human, and the funniest of all the great men this country has ever produced.

Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.

I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions. I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives - a long-distance call once or twice or year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.

I couldn't find any way to tell the truth in a regular newspaper.

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part and discuss it only with consenting adults.

I don't have any children, so I've decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin.

I don't think I've decided much in my life. Don't you think life just happens?

I had sort of given up on conventional journalism. I found it far too restrictive.

I have always been a left-winger and an outsider. I loved being that. I was perfectly cheerful with that role. Then suddenly, you're one of the talking heads on 'Nightline,' and you think you must have sold out.

I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.

I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

I intensely covered Bush when he was Governor of Texas.

I left the 'Trib' in 1970 with the feeling that I would never have a career in establishment media of any kind.

I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics.

I only aim at the powerful.