Heckuva Job Bushie

Mike's summer daydream may be the only place we'll ever hear a thorough mea culpa from Dubya. But while mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned, even in the White House, where the Abramoff scandal inspires an official Ethics Refresher Course: "Right, good. Wrong, bad." The president seeks to clarify: "Invasions are still okay, though. Right?" And through these troubled times, how does 43 sleep at night? Alas, not well. "It's the stem cells. I hear their cries." Heckuva job. Roland's ubiquitous epaulets have recently come home from Rummyworld, "that vast, tumultuous terrorist theme park that used to be known as Iraq." At its chaotic outer edges, in al-Amok, Proconsul Duke survives numerous assassination attempts and the alleged courting of his sidekick by Iraqi suitors. But the serious new action is in New Orleans ("Looting, graft, profiteering -- it's all about the skill set, Honey") and Team Duke, like Halliburton, embarks for the Golf Coast, and sets up a command post on a FEMA-provided cruise ship. Elsewhere on the home front a fully-prostheticized B.D. is increasingly ambulatory, yet finds the struggle to reclaim his mind and emotions is by far the harder part of his journey. The collateral casualty count continues to rise as Zonker is forced to make a traumatic foray into the job market. The option-aware Alex launches an ambitious seven-school college tour, including Walden, where she is clued to her father's unbuttoned-down past. "You were a communist?" "That communard!" When campus total-insiders Jeff and Zip give her the ultimate tour, both are smitten by gal Doonesbury's formidable charms: "So how hot is she?" "Easy, Dude, that's my future wife."

Mike's summer daydream may be the only place we'll ever hear a thorough mea culpa from Dubya. But while mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned, even in the White House, where the Abramoff scandal inspires an official Ethics Refresher Course: "Right, good. Wrong, bad." The president seeks to clarify: "Invasions are still okay, though. Right?" And through these troubled times, how does 43 sleep at night? Alas, not well. "It's the stem cells. I hear their cries." Heckuva job. Roland's ubiquitous epaulets have recently come home from Rummyworld, "that vast, tumultuous terrorist theme park that used to be known as Iraq." At its chaotic outer edges, in al-Amok, Proconsul Duke survives numerous assassination attempts and the alleged courting of his sidekick by Iraqi suitors. But the serious new action is in New Orleans ("Looting, graft, profiteering -- it's all about the skill set, Honey") and Team Duke, like Halliburton, embarks for the Golf Coast, and sets up a command post on a FEMA-provided cruise ship. Elsewhere on the home front a fully-prostheticized B.D. is increasingly ambulatory, yet finds the struggle to reclaim his mind and emotions is by far the harder part of his journey. The collateral casualty count continues to rise as Zonker is forced to make a traumatic foray into the job market. The option-aware Alex launches an ambitious seven-school college tour, including Walden, where she is clued to her father's unbuttoned-down past. "You were a communist?" "That communard!" When campus total-insiders Jeff and Zip give her the ultimate tour, both are smitten by gal Doonesbury's formidable charms: "So how hot is she?" "Easy, Dude, that's my future wife."

Mike's summer daydream may be the only place we'll ever hear a thorough mea culpa from Dubya. But while mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned, even in the White House, where the Abramoff scandal inspires an official Ethics Refresher Course: "Right, good. Wrong, bad." The president seeks to clarify: "Invasions are still okay, though. Right?" And through these troubled times, how does 43 sleep at night? Alas, not well. "It's the stem cells. I hear their cries." Heckuva job. Roland's ubiquitous epaulets have recently come home from Rummyworld, "that vast, tumultuous terrorist theme park that used to be known as Iraq." At its chaotic outer edges, in al-Amok, Proconsul Duke survives numerous assassination attempts and the alleged courting of his sidekick by Iraqi suitors. But the serious new action is in New Orleans ("Looting, graft, profiteering -- it's all about the skill set, Honey") and Team Duke, like Halliburton, embarks for the Golf Coast, and sets up a command post on a FEMA-provided cruise ship. Elsewhere on the home front a fully-prostheticized B.D. is increasingly ambulatory, yet finds the struggle to reclaim his mind and emotions is by far the harder part of his journey. The collateral casualty count continues to rise as Zonker is forced to make a traumatic foray into the job market. The option-aware Alex launches an ambitious seven-school college tour, including Walden, where she is clued to her father's unbuttoned-down past. "You were a communist?" "That communard!" When campus total-insiders Jeff and Zip give her the ultimate tour, both are smitten by gal Doonesbury's formidable charms: "So how hot is she?" "Easy, Dude, that's my future wife."

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. Somehow, despite everything Calvin Trillin wrote about the Bush Administration in Obliviously On He Sails, his 2004 bestseller in verse, George W. Bush is still in the White House. Taking a philosophical view, Trillin has said, “We weren’t going to know whether you could bring down a presidency with iambic pentameter until somebody tried it.” Now Trillin is trying again, back at his pithy and hilarious best to comment on the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq (“Then terrorists could count on what we’d do: / Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you”), his religiosity (“He treats his critics in the press / As if they’re yapping Pekineses. / Reporters deal in mundane facts; / This man has got the word from Jesus”), and whether he was wearing a transmitting device in the first presidential debate (“Could this explain his odd expressions? Is there proof he / Was being told, ‘If you can hear me now, look goofy’?”) Trillin deals with the people around Bush, such as Nanny Dick Cheney and Mushroom Cloud Rice and Orange John Ashcroft and Orange John’s successor, Alberto Gonzales (“The A.G.’s to be one Alberto Gonzales– / Dependable, actually loyal über alles”). He tries to predict the behavior of the famously intemperate John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations in poems with titles like “Bolton Chases French Ambassador Up Tree” and “White House Says Bolton Can Do Job Even While in Straitjacket.” Finally, in dealing with whether the entire Bush Administration, like the unfortunate Brownie, has done a heckuva job, he composes a small-government sea chantey for the Republicans: ’Cause government’s the problem, lads, Americans would all do well to shun it. Yes, government’s the problem, lads. At least it is when we’re the ones who run it.

In the 1960s, the Republican Party began to win over a crucial demographic: white male voters. Presidential politics was transformed for a generation. David Paul Kuhn explains this fundamental fact behind the rise of the Republicans and the decline of the Democrats, and reminds the political left that midterm victories (1986, 2006) do not always equal sustainable success. In revealing, lucid prose, Kuhn explains how America's conservative party came to win a majority of workingmen and the White House. Grounded in practical politics, The Neglected Voter presciently reconfigures the American political landscape. Equipped with unprecedented research data, reporting, and exclusive interviews with such figures as Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer, Mark Warner, and Pat Robertson, Kuhn examines the role of gender and racial identity in presidential politics through the social changes that have defined the last half century.

GENE WEINGARTEN IS THE O. HENRY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM Simply the best storyteller around, Weingarten describes the world as you think it is before revealing how it actually is—in narratives that are by turns hilarious, heartwarming, and provocative, but always memorable. Millions of people know the title piece about violinist Joshua Bell, which originally began as a stunt: What would happen if you put a world-class musician outside a Washington, D.C., subway station to play for spare change? Would anyone even notice? The answer was no. Weingarten’s story went viral, becoming a widely referenced lesson about life lived too quickly. Other classic stories—the one about “The Great Zucchini,” a wildly popular but personally flawed children’s entertainer; the search for the official “Armpit of America”; a profile of the typical American nonvoter—all of them reveal as much about their readers as they do their subjects.

An Iraq War vet struggles with a traumatic brain injury in this Doonesbury book that examines the impact of combat of American soldiers. Headbanging Humvee driver SFC Leo Deluca (a.k.a. Toggle) had a love of ear-bleed battle music—until the sonic distraction led to his vehicle getting blown up in Iraq. Missing an eye and suffering from aphasia, Toggle fights to recover from traumatic brain injury (TBI), a journey of recovery that brings out the best in his former commander, B.D. Toggle's tattooed, metalhead mom initially has reservations about his improbable Facebook romance with an MIT tech-head named Alex, but love blooms. As the story unfolds, Toggle finds himself drawn toward a career in the recording industry, undaunted by the limitations of the New Normal that now defines his life. Crafted with the same kind of insight, humor, and respect that earned Trudeau a Pulitzer prize, Signature Wound is a perceptive and timely look at the contemporary soldier's experience.

This book, part of the acclaimed Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, brings interpersonal neurobiology into the counseling room, weaving the concepts of neurobiology into the ever-changing flow of therapy. Neuroscientific discoveries have begun to illuminate the workings of the active brain in intricate detail. In fact, sometimes it seems that in order to be a cutting-edge therapist, not only do you need knowledge of traditional psychotherapeutic models, but a solid understanding of the role the brain plays as well. But theory is never enough. You also need to know how to apply the theories to work with actual clients during sessions. In easy-to-understand prose, Being a Brain-Wise Therapist reviews the basic principles about brain structure, function, and development, and explains the neurobiological correlates of some familiar diagnostic categories. You will learn how to make theory come to life in the midst of clinical work, so that the principles of interpersonal neurobiology can be applied to a range of patients and issues, such as couples, teens, and children, and those dealing with depression, anxiety, and other disorders. Liberal use of exercises and case histories enliven the material and make this an essential guide for seamlessly integrating the latest neuroscientific research into your therapeutic practice.