To be honest, I was hoping that there was something in The MAD War on Bush about Scooter Libby’s blatant disregard for national security that I could draw upon for this item to make it extra timely, but no such luck. Still, since I suspect most of us remember MAD for the movie and TV parodies, Dave Berg‘s “Lighter Side” gags, and the Sergio Aragones bits tucked away in the margins, the sharp political commentary collected here, which stretches back to the 2000 elections, is a bit of an eye-opener. Oh, sure, there’s the obvious gags about Bush’s bumbling appearance (remember the pretzel they told us he choked on?) and Alfred E. Neuman getting shot in the face by the vice-president, but there’s also some absolutely brutal jabs: “Only a Republican could possibly believe,” runs one particularly cutting remark, “that a shrimpy, goon-eared, war-avoiding chickenhawk in a flightsuit is any less laughable than Dukakis in his Snoopy tank suit.” In another feature, the magazine juxtaposes Bush’s tasteless “no weapons of mass destruction here” gag at a White House Correspondent’s Dinner with row after row of flag-draped corpses—political commentary that wouldn’t be out of place in more “mature” outlets like The Daily Show or even The Nation.
“MAD has no political agenda,” insists editor John Ficarra in his introduction. “We begin each new administration with a clean slate and we wait for them to do something really stupid before pouncing on them. (Usually that happens around day two.)” Clearly, they’ve had a lot to work with over the last six years. And now I’m actually curious to see what they might make of Bush’s blatant favoritism towards his felonious underlings, or Cheney’s assertion that he’s not part of the executive branch…