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I just finished reading the TPB of Ultimates 2 - Grand Theft America and have been greatly reinforced in my notion that, well, Mark Millar is a twit - and I haven't even touched the Civil War stuff he's done for Marvel, where he made Iron Man a jack-booted thug and earned the enmity of a lot of other fans.

Why?

It's not because he likes write polemic in comics he writes. Not even because he does that in a manner most commonly described as "Green Party masturbatory fantasies" or has Mary Sue characters rail in frustration at the stupidity of humanity. It's because he's really bad at making coherent points about the real world while using fiction set in a setting that's very alien from our own, especially when he's actually helped shape much of that setting.

Background in this case:
• In the "Ultimate Marvel" setting, SHIELD is not the original-Marvel upright military task force that's vaguely referred to as being a NATO or UN operation. Instead, it's basically something like its own branch of the US military with a weirdly fascist logo of a stylized eagle. They have a whole fleet of flying aircraft carriers, legions of foot-soldiers, swarms of guys in battle-suits, an intelligence branch that sounds right out of a paranoid's worst fears, and a major program of trying to develop a super-human military force. They naturally have more funding than God, and are actually often used as an entertaining synthesis of military/spy porn in their uber-competence and the threat of authority in their ruthlessness.
• The Ultimates are this setting's Avengers, except they exist as the very pointy end of the SHIELD spear and mostly violently kill anyone they go up against. As that's mainly been alien invaders, not too bad.
• At the end of the prior volume of the series, the Ultimates (with SHIELD backup) were seen forcibly relieving an unnamed Middle Eastern Country of its honest-and-for-true nuclear arsenal.

So...in this volume of Ultimates, there's blowback from that invasion. We see the details of that strike on nuclear facilities in, of all countries, Azerbaijan. For irony later hammered in, we see a 98-pound weakling named Abdul start on the path of vengeance after he gets barked at by Captain America during the forcible evacuation of his nearby village (presumably due to contaminants released during the attack). After he makes some really mild gripes to a friend about how it's unfair that his village has to be evacuated, someone among the evacuees says he knows of folks who let make him able to stop this sort of thing... So, terrorists with some sort of super-human-making technology? OK, decent setup...

Well, no. Apparently, a big plot is a-brewing by "the enemies of the United States". France, Russia, China, Syria, Iran, and North Korea (?!) have all covertly joined forces to take down the United States. In a meeting in Paris, apparently under the Louvre (???) one month before the first strike, they talk up their plans to use Russian troops in sleek power-suits, a small army of giant robots, huge starship-looking carriers, and their own (inevitable) superhuman team called the "Liberators" - led, of course, by Abdul, who's the only person besides Steve Rogers to have responded well to the super-soldier serum. (Apparently, that guy from his village had their number or something...)

Then, they proceed to stomp in and take over the US in an amazing cakewalk, making a speech about how America's ambitions have exceeded its capabilities as they knock down the Statue of Liberty. (The rest of the story involves the inevitable comeback by the Ultimates, with some mostly-offscreen assistance by the EU superhuman team and the many superheroes of NYC.)

At that point in the story, however, I'm making peculiar faces.

Why is a Scottish lefty using a plot that sounds like some warblogger comic geek's fever-dream? Why does a Russian whine about the Motherland being reduced to a nation of "hookers and gangsters" when they have the resources to field a really damn effective army of guys in super-strong, flying battlesuits? Why do members of the Liberators, recruited in "Terror Trials" and mostly coming from very undemocratic countries, discuss in all seriousness letting the American people have free elections, especially since many were unhappy with the selection of "their last Caesar"?

(And for the nonpolitical stuff, you get many, many questions, starting with "How the Hell does torturing 'defense codes' out of poor Hawkeye let them fly a fleet of giant airships across oceans and into the airspace of pretty much every major US city without anyone noticing until they actually arrive?")

And just why, after setting everything up as a muddled tale of blowback, does he reveal that everything's actually due to the evil machinations of Loki, who's trying to bring about Ragnarök?

Augh.