Power isn’t only the ultimate aphrodisiac, it’s the ultimate hallucinogen–and satirist Paul Krassner has been talking America through the bad trips of its leaders for the last 40 years. A veteran stand-up comic, seminal figure in the underground press, and cofounder of the Yippie party, Krassner fuses absurd fact with freewheeling fantasy in his biting, sometimes bilious humor, which skewers the rampant paranoia, hypocrisy, delusion, and warped sexuality that infect public figures regardless of race, religion, or ideological orientation. Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger, Clarence Thomas, Marion Barry, Dan Quayle, and many more have been the targets of Krassner’s scathing, raunchy political parodies–and you’re never quite sure what’s fiction and what’s not. (When Quayle was prepping for federal drug tests, Krassner asserts, he sent away for some drug-free powdered urine that Barry had tipped him off to; when the powder arrived he poured it into a glass–and then peed in it.)
