Heckuva Job, Bushie! is the latest Doonesbury collection, a big fat thing that spans the GW Bush years. I was raised on Doonesbury — it was reading Trudeau's Watergate strips that led me to go to the library and research Watergate and Vietnam when I was a boy — and it's amazing how sharp, relevant, and brave he manages to be after all these decades. It's clear that the years have honed, rather than blunted, Trudeau's razor.
As the effects of the Bush attacks on the US economy, family, child, public image, security, and constitution continue to be felt, it's easy to forget how shocking some of the individual outrages have been. Re-reading the Doonesbury strips from Plamegate and the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination reminded me afresh of just how incompetently the Chief Executive has run this country.
These were seminal strips in the long-lived Doonesbury storyline — BD goes to war, loses a leg and comes home with PTSD; two color Sunday strips consist of nothing but lists of American Iraq casualties in 9-point type; Mike's kid goes to college, bloggers come to the strip, Duke copes with the death of Hunter S Thompson. There were hundreds of laughs between these covers, and not all of them bitter. This is the perfect semi-sweet balm to tide us over until 2008.
See also:
Doonesbury skewers creationism/intelligent design
Doonesbury runs for Congress
Blogging in Doonesbury
Doonesbury: will Creationists take modern antibiotics?
Doonesbury references masturbation, America's editors surrender
Doonesbury on Napster
Doonesbury to be dropped for being 'too controversial'
Doonesbury on DRM
Bushisms in today's Doonesbury
Doonesbury's lost Miers confirmation strips
Duke's first Doonesbury appearances
Garry Trudeau puts $10K up for anyone who will confirm Bush's Air Guard claims
