2013-07-25
Explanation
This comic is a satire of political and media rhetoric, presented as a news broadcast. A news anchor reports on an escalating series of government actions and surveillance measures, each one more extreme than the last. The broadcast begins with a relatively mild statement about the president making a statement, then progressively ratchets up to reports about acquiring documents on all citizens, monitoring social media, accessing private communications, and other increasingly invasive government overreach.
The humor lies in the steady escalation of authoritarian measures, each delivered with the same calm, matter-of-fact news anchor tone. The comic satirizes how media can normalize extreme government actions by presenting them in the same bland, routine format as ordinary news. Each panel ups the ante on civil liberties violations, but the presentation never changes -- it is all just another day on the news.
At the end, the comic delivers its punchline when the anchor mentions something about Hitler, and a viewer at home responds with outrage -- but only at the Hitler comparison, not at any of the actual surveillance and authoritarian measures described in the preceding panels. This skewers the tendency in political discourse to ignore substantive policy concerns but become outraged when someone invokes a Nazi comparison, satirizing how people are more concerned with rhetorical etiquette than actual threats to their freedoms.
The votey reads "Today''s comic is an allegory for the War of 1812," which is a joke about critics who over-interpret comics or assign allegorical meaning where none was intended, adding a meta-humor layer.