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Lots of great Ivins' tributes floating around out there, but this one from Rude Pundit may very well be the best. An excerpt, including plenty of excerpts of Irvin's herself:

Just a few paragraphs to remember how eloquently brutal Ivins could be, like this one from her January 21, 1999 column, about what was obviously her least favorite topic, the entire Lewinsky/Clinton tale:

"My other favorite argument is that Clinton mustn't be allowed to 'get away with it.' Get away with what? Did you ever in your life see anyone more caught, more ruthlessly exposed in relentless detail? It is mind-boggling enough that this pathetic, sordid episode is the subject of an impeachment trial; now comes the question of whether the Senate has so lost all sense of seemliness as to bring Monica Lewinsky and Company into the U.S. Senate to tell once more the tawdry tale of the 10 oral encounters that shook the world."

In her writings, Ivins despised those things that were distractions from the real work of government, of doing the work of and for the people of the nation. And the impeachment of Clinton was the right wing engaging in Caligula-like decadence for the sake of itself. Ivins ripped into the conservative machine, only to see it take things to the next level of ignorance and depravity with the Iraq war.

Prescient (and right) as ever, Ivins said in a February 11, 1998 column about the crazed House of Representatives speaking in session: "Next up, several members decide to demand that if we use air strikes against Iraq, we take out Saddam Hussein. In the first place, murdering foreign leaders is not a proper tool of foreign policy, for the sensible reason that you never know what you'll get if you do. One of the most famous hypothetical questions of history is: What if someone had managed to murder Adolf Hitler early on? Suppose someone did, and then the Nazi movement had been taken over by, say, Albert Speer, who was a lot better organized than Hitler?"

Ivins never became the regular TV pundit that so many other alleged columnists became. Perhaps it was because of moments like this, being interviewed about the brewing Clinton "scandal" on some Fox "news" program in March 1998: "If we had devoted this much time and this much space in the newspapers to the single most important problem in American politics today, which is the money that finances campaigns and the way the people that get elected respond to that money, we would have solved the problem by now. We would have the people of this country so outraged, they would be demanding campaign finance reform. What are we doing? We're talking about the president's dick. It's ridiculous."

[...]

She said, often, that the sins of omission were the real crimes of contemporary journalism. Her columns so often filled that gap, talking about labor and working people and countries like the Congo and Indonesia. She refused in the last few years to get drawn into the false debate of "would you rather Saddam still be in power," turning that around to say that the left never wanted him in power in the first place.

She will be deeply missed.