Why Do They Kill Me? Book

"Kreider rules."—David Foster Wallace.

For years Tim Kreider's cartoons, as collected in 2004's The Pain: When Will It End?, were single-panel non sequiturs in the tradition of B. Kliban, about the squalor and ridiculousness of the human condition. But after the takeover by the Bush-Cheney regime and the War on Terror, he focused his bitter humor on more timely issues. His political cartoons have been, in the words of Ted Rall (not known as a sentimental softie), "among the most viscerally anti-Bush work around." As reality has become ever more nightmarish, Kreider's been driven to push the outer limits of humor to parody it. In this collection you will find:

• The Girls of Hamas calendar
• The artist's conception of "Negropolis" (Strom Thurmond's proposal for a lunar colony for the repatriation of African-Americans)
• John Ashcroft imagining eating Donald Rumsfeld as their bunker crumbles around them
• U.S. jets bombing the Great Pyramids in the War on Horror
• An analysis of the all-important Shithead Vote
• An expose of the link between homosexuality and terrorism
• And an ashen stake driven, just as a precaution, through Ronald Reagan's heart

Cynical, astute, blackly hilarious, and deeply biased, these cartoons are neither the superficial, obvious jibes that appear in your daily paper's editorial section nor the didactic left-wing rants syndicated in your local alternative weekly; they are the artistic equivalent of hollow-point bullets fired from a high-powered rifle with a laser sight directly into the brain of the Bush administration.