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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
kicking the hell out of bush, October 21, 2008
Exhaustive and witty evisceration of the Bush year, cleverly drawn and written. Steier goes through the lamentable and violent history of the administration, character by character and screw-up by screw-up. Her favorite target is clearly Cheney, with Wolfowitz a close second. Most impressive is that, unlike some cartooists, she actually knows where the bodies are buried, and which policy lead to which disaster. Her drawing is sharp and very Jack Davis, and could act as an instruction book for those who come after. Good use of ink, pencil and graphics programs, kept in proper balance. J. Danziger
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Primer on How Cartoons Can Be Deployed, December 4, 2008
If, on the eve of the dissolution of the Bush League, you want to spend the holidays screaming with acrid albeit hysterical laughter at what they've done to us all and how they did it, this is the book for you: Fringe, A Cartoon History of the George Dubya Bush Years by Elena Steier is a zestful roiling stew, a delightfully vicious hodge-podge, of all kinds of cartooning, all aimed at revealing just how dysfunctional the depraved administration of George W. ("Whopper") Bush has been. Political cartoonist Steier, who claims to be a conservative, is understandably outraged at neocon policies that "have caused untold damage to the American people and economy over the last eight years," and she musters a war chest of sharp-pointed weapons to her satirical cause: with comic strip parodies, panel cartoons, fake posters, ersatz comic book covers, and just funny pictures she skewers tax cuts, war mongering, idiot journalists, bigger government, wire-tapping, Enron, the righteous religious Right, the politics of the "Just Us" Department of Alberto Gonzales, torturing helpless prisoners, contracting out military and security functions to private mult-national corporations (who make millions while ordinary U.S. foot soldiers draw a comparative pittance in pay), Katrina and the outright failure of government--to name a few of the fiascos that have been elevated to full-scale disasters by Bush League incompetence. Steier unveils the venality at their core.
Venality or simple idiocy. "Bush was never the conservative I hoped he might be," Steier writes, "--instead, he represented a fringe group with an unclear agenda." Fringe the book collects 8 years of her political cartoons. "They cannot be more timely," she says, "given the current economic crisis. No matter what readers' political affiliations may be, I hope they'll find the cartoons thought-provoking and hilarious."
All of that, I say. Steier is just about the sharpest tack in the pack: her insights into political shenanigans are uncannily accurate. She acutely sees that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security effectively renames the United States "The Homeland"; her cartoon asserts that the renaming is a tactic aimed at "fooling the enemy." If terrorists can no longer find the "United States" on the map, how will they be able to attack us? But there's more to it than that, she says: "Championed by Joe Lieberman, the Department of Homeland Security came into existence as yet another path for companies to find their way to the government dole." I've always found the term "homeland" vaguely disquieting: it smacks of another time and another place, the "fatherland" of fascist Germany.
Says Steier in the introduction to one of the chapters in the book: "Sadly, it wasn't just the names of things that we were changing to suit our desires, but apparently national intelligence as well. It took Joe Wilson and a letter to the New York Times after the invasion of Iraq to set out that scenario for the American people. This was followed up by the outing of his wife as a CIA agent by members of the administration in cahoots with the media. If you think my cartoons are wild, just wrap your mind about that series of events. Administration guys trying to protect their fantasies, decided a good way to combat reality is to put the covert services at risk. On the one hand, that's treason; on the other, these guys are most probably innocent by way of insanity; and on the third hand--wow, I just said `on the third hand'..." In another chapter, she sees Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in their true light: "To commemorate our country's newfound belief in legalized torture, I began drawing members of the Bush administration in sado-masochistic gear." In that sentence by itself, we have a healthy inkling of the bent of Steier's so-called mind. And a brilliantly creative bent it is.
With the 2006 off-year elections, Steier produced a series of what she calls "kids comic strips," inspired, in a manner of speaking, by the movie "the King of Scotland." Steier notes that the movie's protagonist, Nicholas Garrigan, "gets a little spooked by his patron, ruthless Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Amin asks what's the matter, and Garrigan replies: `You're so like a child. That's what makes you so frightening.' That's my take on the Bush Administration," Steier continues. "Like children, this bunch was so free of rules and oversight that the thought of actually doing what's best for the country never occurred to them. After Katrina, however, the adults came out, which is why the 2006 elections were so disastrous for the Republicans." Steier's kid strips feature the usual gang of idiots--GeeDubya, Rummy, Uncle Dick, and "Condilucy," all vaguely resembling the Peanuts cast.
This is a book you must see: it is a hilariously exhaustive demonstration of the variety of ways cartoons can be sledgehammers to knock some common sense into our typically laxidasical and otherwise inert brains.
Steier began her freelancing career for the West Hartford News then went into weekly syndication with DBR Media. At present, she is a "full-time freelancer," doing illustration. Her political cartoons, which she does mostly for her own amusement, are visible exclusively at the website for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC; [...]).
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