I’m quite a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to presidential bashing. I’ve long been of the opinion that the president is deserving of respect. It’s been quite a challenge living out this commitment for the past four years, but I’ve more or less managed. When I see my fellow liberals refer to President Bush as “Resident Bush,” “Georgie Boy,” or “Bu**sh**,” or any of a variety of other insulting nicknames, I cringe: no minds will be changed with such nasty rhetoric. Yes, he’s a bad man. Yes, he gained office under, at best, under a cloud. Yes, I want him out of office. But he’s the president of the United States, and he deserves a modicum of respect.
With this in mind, I confess that I take a guilty pleasure in well-done political satire. Good humor is good humor — it skewers its target mockingly while making a worthwhile point. In such a context, being insulting is funny because it subverts the hierarchy of respect, which, incidentally, is precisely the classist aspect of British comedy that makes it so hard for Americans to understand.
One of these works is “Little Bush Goes To Washington,” an amusing 80-page, 40-illustration children’s-book-style accounting of Bush’s first (and, I assume, only) four years in office. It’s a creation of my old friend Brian Connors, who worked with an illustrator who has created a funky mixture of crude drawings and portions of photographs to yield a funny, timely look at the four years through which the bulk of Americans have survived.
Find out a bit more and pick up a copy on the book’s website.