Politics & Power Quote by Molly Ivins

Ivins weaponizes the locker-room braggadocio of Texas politics by reciting it so plainly it becomes grotesque. The line is built like a toast, but it’s really an indictment: politics as a closed circuit of indulgence, extraction, and betrayal, where “belonging” is measured by how shamelessly you can exploit the very people you’re supposed to represent. The vulgarity isn’t incidental; it’s the point. By putting “drink,” “screw,” “take,” and “vote against” in one breath, she collapses pleasure, power, and policy into the same transactional rhythm. It’s funny because it’s scandalously specific, and because the cadence mimics folksy wisdom. It lands because you can hear the grin that dares you to deny it.

The subtext is a feminist and populist critique delivered in the dialect of the clubhouse. “Their women” reduces women to property in a male political economy; Ivins repeats that ugliness to expose it, not endorse it. “Take their money” and “vote against ’em anyway” is the real blade: the legislature as a place where lobby cash and constituent interests pass like ships in the night, with lawmakers boasting about the gap.

Context matters: Ivins came up as a Texas columnist with a reporter’s nose for hypocrisy and a satirist’s instinct for the memorable phrase. She’s not describing one bad actor; she’s sketching a culture where corruption is normalized as competence. The intent isn’t just to shock. It’s to make the system sound like itself, and then dare the reader to accept it as normal.