Okay, I don't know if Ms. Ivins has siblings, or if they have offspring, so as to make her "Aunt Molly" to anybody really. The line was just too good to pass up:

For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be eliminated. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching President Bush, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.

The creepy part is the overlap. Damned if they aren't still here, after all these years, the old Nixon hands--Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the whole gang whose yearning for authoritarian government rose like a stink over the Nixon years. Imperial executive. Bring back those special White House guard uniforms. Cheney, like some malignancy that cannot be killed off, back at the same old stand, pushing the same old crap.

For those non-reconstructed non-registerers (fwiw, the Trib's is pretty short and harmless, and I hate registrations more than any of you, trust me), I include her final graf:

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the U.S. is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we're up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Take care with any oaths you might swear, in jest or otherwise, this New Year's Eve. Crunch time is coming soon.