The Open Boat

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died today at her home in Austin. She was 62.

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"There are two kinds of humor," she told People magazine. One was the kind "that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity," she said. "The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That's what I do."

Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the muckraking biweekly that would become her spiritual home for life.

Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was "reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious," and its legislature was "reporter heaven." When the legislature was set to convene, she warned her readers: "Every village is about to lose its idiot."

Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed President George H.W. Bush benignly. ("Real Texans do not use the word 'summer' as a verb," she wrote.)

But she derided President George W. Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" (2000) and "Bushwhacked" (2003).

In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush's re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. In her last column, earlier this month, she urged readers to "raise hell" against the war.