“They think they’re the top dogs, and we’re a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?”

The wisest Texans of the pat 30 years were not the Bush brothers, or any Senators or Governors or the first Bush president.

With the passing of both Ann Richards (“Poor George! He can’t help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!”) and Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower has became the funniest person in Texas politics -- intentionally, that is.

Michael Winship was senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which concluded last Friday night on PBS. Winship wrote this excellent piece on  Jim Hightower who was interviewed a week or two ago by Moyers.

My kind of kidder. Samples:

{Hightower at the Dem Convention 1980] described Bush Sr. as a “toothache of a man,” a cruel but remarkable metaphor. And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was “born on third base and thought he hit a triple . . . He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber.”

It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I’ve heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution.

(On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, “Oh good. Now he’ll be bi-ignorant.”)

As Hightower’s fond of saying, the water won’t clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek. ‘I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power … overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they’re the top dogs, and we’re a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?”

They’ve got the fat cats, but we’ve got the alley cats

“Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.”

Read The lowdown from Hightower
By Michael Winship Online Journal Guest Writer