BOOK REVIEW : Mostly Hits From Liberal Straight Shooter : NOTHIN’ BUT GOOD TIMES AHEAD <i> by Molly Ivins</i> , Random House, $23, 255 pages

If you voted for George Bush in the last election, you might want to ignore this review, and certainly the book of collected essays it is about.

*

Texas political columnist and hard-line, fast-talking liberal Molly Ivins makes no bones about her likes and dislikes--and the one man lucky enough to make both lists was the former president, who inspired some of Ivins’ most florid prose with what she considered to be his dependably despicable behavior. She will miss having him around to make her life miserable and her columns glow.

Ivins wrote for the Dallas Times Herald until it went out of business; after a brief sojourn in the land of the unemployed (angrily and humorously immortalized in her essay “Looking for Work,” she surfaced as a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

But Ivins is hardly one of the authoritative pontificators who people the Sunday morning political talk shows. She takes potshots; well-informed ones, certainly, but potshots nonetheless. Do not read her for a calm, considered analysis of national events.

Outrage is what motivates her, more often than not, and it makes for the best essays in “Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead.”

One of my favorites is, “Where Is the Justice in Enormous Disparity in Sentences?” Just before the Bush Administration was about to appoint 14 new federal judges in Texas, Ivins pointed out the painful difference in two sentences handed down by conservative jurist Judge Joe Fish of Dallas.

Fish had sentenced a convicted savings-and-loan swindler to “a mere five years in some federal playpen, a stretch sure to be halved by good time.”

Shirley Harris, convicted along with some family and friends of conspiracy, wire fraud and mail fraud, got 60 years--even though all she did was answer phones, even though she was too afraid of her abusive husband to question the operations of their cosmetic franchise business.

Ivins implies that the swindler got off easy because he was a powerful pal of powerful people, and Harris got a twelvefold sentence because she was nobody important. The essay is an awful, powerful piece, the perfect combination of fury and information.

Ivins’ stance on the 1992 presidential candidates is predictable, and consistent, which means that Clinton fans love her, Bush fans dismiss her, and Perot fans wonder why she didn’t support the home state candidate. “New Heights of Piffle” is an easy shot at two men who just don’t get it, to the glorification of the one who does. Sometimes Ivins’ subjects provide such wonderful material that all she has to do is serve it up in her good-old-girl prose.

*

She doesn’t fare quite as well when she attempts to glide by on cuteness. Her reflection on book tours, “Being an ‘Arthur,’ ” is corny, superficial and not-so-new news.

“There are only two reasons to put yourself through it,” she writes. “The first is that your book is sure to sink without a trace unless you do TV and radio. . . .And the second is that writers who do it usually come back with at least one story to dine out on for the rest of their lives.”

But Ivins forgets the one reason not to write about the dreadful experience: No one but other writers, and only the masochistic ones at that, is really interested in the particular type of torture involved.

Another adventure in Author Land, “Madonna and Other Arthurs,” comes perilously close to sounding like the first thing Ivins thought up when her editor woke her from a nap and asked her where the hell today’s column was.

Ivins is better off as an irate citizen of the world, railing at the macho law-enforcement officers who stormed the Koresh compound; lauding Clinton Cabinet member Henry Cisneros, whose political career was thrown off course by an affair he admitted to publicly, and talking about her favorite subject--Bush. She is a big writer, fond of cartoonish language and excess, and best feeds her habit with appropriately big issues.

A daily columnist I know talks about the punishing discipline of having to be smart so often, and figures three out of five columns is a good batting average.

Ivins hits more often than that (OK, sometimes she has the luxury of writing for monthly magazines). The best pieces are inspired; the worst, irritating and a little self-indulgent.

But they’re quick, and the next one will likely make up for the momentary disappointment.