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Date Posted: 13:13:29 08/28/04 Sat
Author: Inkwell Archives
Subject: Mailbag: Molly Ivins’s Walnut Problem

Inkwell Archives
Mailbag: Molly Ivins’s Walnut Problem

Our ever-vigilant fellow blogger Jackie points out via e-mail that twangy syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, who ran scared at the prospect of debating Ann Coulter in Gene Weingarten’s humor column on Sunday for the Washington Post magazine (see below, Dec. 29), is not only a liberal, but also seems to be something of a lifter. Of quotes from other pundits, that is.

On Aug. 26, 2003, Ivins led off a column devoted to California’s gubernatorial race with this sentence: "One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts." (You can read the column here on Alternet.) So vivid was Ivins’s nutty simile that it was requoted everywhere, including by Ivins herself a few weeks later on CNN. Weingarten himself used it as his reason to select Molly to debate Coulter (Ivins, though, despite her evident fondness for testosterone-laden figures of speech, wouldn’t even return Weingarten’s phone call.)

Seems, however, that those walnuts were picked from a different tree from the one growing inside Ivins’s head. The condom simile was actually coined years ago by Clive James, the Australian born, UK-dwelling critic and novelist, in connection with James’s thoughts about Arnold’s "Terminator" movies. On Aug. 8, 2003, The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper, carried a profile of Schwarzenegger that included the walnut quote, duly attributed to James. Did Ivins read The Guardian that day? Did she think, "Aw hay-ell, them Amurrican lib’ruls are so dang dumb they’ll laugh at anythin’ ah wra-ite in mah quaint Tay-xas-accent! They won’t even chay-eck!"?

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