Liberal imagination

[emad]

Liberal imagination

Chelsea Clinton is the US president, and Osama bin Laden is speaking to the UN. It's happening in the world of comic book writer Mike Mackey, as David Batty discovers.

Thursday September 15, 2005


What would a world run by antiwar liberals look like?
That's the premise of a new comic book, Liberality for All, set in an alternate future in which Al Gore won the 2000 US election and liberals went on to create a dystopia where a corrupt UN, led by the French president, Jacques Chirac, has appeased Islamist fundamentalists and invited Osama bin Laden to give the memorial address on the 20 anniversary of the September 11 attacks.


Needless to say, the comic's author, Mike Mackey, is a conservative fed up with liberal protests against the war in Iraq.
In his story, Chelsea Clinton is the president, Michael Moore is vice-president and the Department of Political Correctness has curtailed freedom of speech. It's up to a trio of neo-con cyborg superheroes, including Oliver North, to free the US from "ultraliberal extremism".

The series opens with the heroes attempting to stop Bin Laden - who has been appointed the UN's Afghan ambassador - from detonating a nuclear bomb at the September 11 memorial service. The nuke has come courtesy of Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, who is now the president of Iraq because the liberal Gore government didn't have the balls to invade the country.

Tasteless, tacky - or just a wind up designed to push people's buttons? Online previews of Liberality, published next month, have provoked both outrage and praise on blogs and internet talkboards, with posters divided over whether it is neo-con propaganda or a send up of rightwing fears. Mackey, a 37-year-old comic book dealer from Kentucky ("what Michael Moore refers to as Jesus Land"), says he wrote the book partly in response to the liberal view that the occupation of Iraq was misguided.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1570741,00.html

[zbdent]

1. Another fine example of having to dumb down your message

so that your target audience can understand it.

Liberals read Moby Dick, the Iliad, etc.

Neocons waited until the comic books came out . . .

[ret5hd]

2. comics are very effective for propaganda...nazis used them in germany...

u.s. has used them in iraq.

[zbdent]

3. You're helping me make my point

:)