Molly Ivins

Mary Tyler Ivins, journalist and writer: born Monterey, California 30 August 1944; died Austin, Texas 31 January 2007.

Molly Ivins was the sort of journalist there are all too few of in the United States, and for that matter anywhere: racy, raunchy, utterly irreverent and, most important, gloriously funny. She was a larger-than-life contradiction in terms: a six-foot tall, hard-drinking, good ol' Texan girl - but also an irrepressible liberal, fluent in French, who may have coined more devastating one-liners than anyone since Dorothy Parker.

The orthodox journalism of the day was never going to contain Molly Ivins. In 1976, after five years on the Texas Observer, an impecunious bastion of liberalism in the Lone Star state, she was hired by The New York Times to liven up its somewhat dreary pages. But it was a mismatch made in hell. The colourful Ivins prose was far too much for the Grey Lady: a politician's "beer gut that belongs in the Smithsonian" was edited down to "a protuberant abdomen".

When she was sent to Denver as Rocky Mountains Bureau Chief ("They only had one correspondent in the region," she later joked) Ivins signed her professional death warrant on the Times with a 1980 piece that referred to a chicken-cleaning festival in New Mexico as a "gang-pluck". Recalled to New York and demoted, she soon fled back to Texas, as a columnist first for the Dallas Times Herald, later for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, with the promise she could write whatever she wanted.

She couldn't abide Dallas - the sort of place, she once said, that would have rooted for Goliath against David. But it produced a memorable zinger against a local Republican Congressman, that "if his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day". The reaction was outrage - which the Times Herald turned into a promotional campaign with posters proclaiming, "Molly Ivins, She Can't Say That . . . Can She?" The slogan soon became the title of the first of the eight books she either wrote or co-authored.

Though she was born in California, her family moved to Texas when Ivins was one. From the outset she was a rebel. But her education was East Coast establishment, at the exclusive all-women Smith College in Massachusetts, followed by Columbia University Journalism School and a year in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. But only after working for papers in Houston and Minneapolis did she find her true spiritual home at the Texas Observer, based in Austin, home of the Texas legislature and the exuberant Texas state politics that would be her inspiration.

She called it "The Lege", and in Ivins's view it housed the laziest, most corrupt, most incompetent and most entertaining bunch of lawmakers on earth. "When the Legislature is set to convene," she once told her readers, "every village is about to lose its idiot." She waded into its members with gusto - and also into a certain governor of the state named George W. Bush. Ivins is credited with inventing the nickname "Shrub", as in Shrub: the short but happy political life of George W. Bush, co-authored with the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, and published in 2000 when the Governor was running for President.

Three years later the pair came up with another bestseller, Bushwacked: life in George W. Bush's America. Ivins, as will be apparent, was a passionate foe of Bush and all he stood for - first and foremost the Iraq war. "There are two kinds of humour," she once told People magazine. One was the kind

that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That's what I do.

Her comic gift, however, was also to see politics as theatre, and to realise that the reviewers like herself were part of the drama. She would consciously play to her image as folksy speaker of truth to power. She could mix Smith College and life on the range with hilarious effect. Who but Molly Ivins could have come up with, "the sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo"?

She was vinegary, but quite without self-pity. In later life, she described herself as a

left-wing ageing 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.

Even the breast cancer that would kill her was a source of bitter humour. "First they mutilate you," she wrote, "then they poison you; then they burn you. I've been on blind dates better than that." She kept up her columns almost until the end. Her last, typically, was another tirade against the "ridiculous" war in Iraq. "We need people in the streets," she told her readers, "banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!' "