LOL ROTFLOL *gasp* WAAHAA - OK OK *gasp* I think I can at least type now. If not speak. Before I tell you what this book is about, I have to confess something that might give you cause to question my capacity to review such a book as this, if not my intelligence itself. I believed, when I ordered this book that it was exactly what its title said it was. Nor, did I immediately comprehend the true nature of it once I held it in my hands and caught sight of the bright red front cover with the gold-embossed title and the black diagonal band across the bottom left corner declaring the book to have been stolen from the White House by Andy Borowitz.
Even after opening the book and thumbing through the pages and noting the grayed-out shade of many of the pages consistent with photocopying — the doodles, the smudges, the thumbprints on the edges of the pages and the handwritten notes scattered in the margins throughout — I did not catch on. I always was the last one to get the joke, often laughing at the punch line several minutes, if not hours, after the fact. Knowing this might give you pause as you consider whether to read on, committing your precious time to a critique of a political satire book by someone with an obviously low HQ (humor quotient), but I believe in full disclosure.
Does it help to know that I had been anticipating something more on the lines of this memo acquired by Raw Story last August and downloadable in PDF format? I didn’t think so.
Before I encountered this book I had never heard of Andy Borowitz, nor read or even heard of any of the half-dozen or so titles he had previously published. But now that we’ve established a relationship of complete transparency maybe we can at least have a bit of fun as we take a quick romp through the pages of Andy’s wickedly funny Republican Playbook, which is masterfully reverse-engineered from meticulous observation of GOP behavior while in office.
This little book is replete with talking points on major issues, keys to victory in a number of key states, leadership lessons for George Bush, suggestions for tricky uses of new technology to advance their domination of the elections, the electorate and each branch of government and musings on lessons learned from the past - some of which are in the included forewords by previous owners of the manual, Nixon, Reagan, and Papa Bush. Every page is a minefield of guffaws, and adding to the piquancy of the jokes are the scattered "notes to self" in the purported handwriting of GW.
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