Welcome to Day Five of the Accordion Guy Advent Calendar. Today's goodie: comics!

First, let's take a look at a recent comic by Ted Rall. If you're not familiar with Martin Niemoller's poem, you're going to miss the not-so-subtle reference...



Now while I think that some of the actions of the current U.S. administration are intended to have chilling effects and are curtailments on the freedoms for which they've been a role model, it hasn't and probably will not come to this. It exists only as a paranoid fantasy in the minds of those the extreme left and as a wet dream in the extreme right-wing blogsphere (Adam Yoshida, I'm lookin' at you).

Even less probable are the events depicted in the comic book Liberality for All, in which the gentlemen pictured below are action heroes:


Almost as implausible as making Michael Moore and Al Franken into comic book action heroes.

Uh...yeah.

The comic (literally) takes place in a different reality: one where Al Gore was acclaimed the winner of the 2000 election deadlock. Like a gazillion "what if" speculative fiction stories in which one historical detail is changed, the future was altered drastically. Let's look at Sean Hannity, a year after 9/11:


What would have Gore done? Feel free to speculate in the comments.

That was all flashback. The comic actually takes place in the year 2021, 20 years after 9/11. The UN effectively runs the US (currently ruled by President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore). We jump to the UN in New York, where the "Honourable UN Representative from Afghanistan" is being warmly greeted:


Don't laugh. In the comic, I'm sure the NDP is running Canada.

The next panel, which I haven't included, shows the UN ambassadors from Canada, Germany, France and Spain -- guilty parties in right-wing eyes -- applauding. Suckers! Osama's goodwill gesture is a front: he's actually planning to bring a nuke to New York City!

In the meantime, let's get back to Hannity. In the year 2021, with conservatism outlawed, he's part of the underground, broadcasting his show via pirate radio and a key player in the resistance. For reasons that I suspect are being saved for later, he lost his right arm (presumably in a skirmish with left-wing pinko fellow-travellers) and now has a bionic prosthesis. He also sports an eyepatch in the style of Colonel Nick Fury from S.H.I.E.L.D.:


By "those who can't", he means "the pampered upper-middle and upper class, tongue-tied folks that they are". His chamber is lit with red lightbulbs in memory of the red states.

Luckily for Hannity, he's got help: G. Gordon Liddy, looking as spry as he did when I last saw him during a visit to Crazy Go Nuts University in the late eighties (for reasons unknown, he was often a guest lecturer during Homecoming). Back then, he was so damned proud of his involvement in the Nixon scandal that his car sported the licence plate H20GATE. In the comic, he's traded the car for a motorbike which he drives with action-hero adeptness.


Even with at least three laser sights locked on his dome, Liddy can observe a moment of silence for his dead homies.

Hey, what's a right-wing action hero comic without a little dig at gun control? Or, for that matter, France?


The real G. Gordon Liddy would never touch a French gun!

No matter where you live in the political spectrum (see this map of where I live in Politopia, according to their quiz), I'm sure you'll find this comic, Liberality for All, entertaining reading.

If you didn't like the comic -- or at least not in the way its creators probably intended -- hey, good for you. You are probably free of head injury.