>The Earth Alliance are jokes as well, but they're very clearly
>meant to be deliberate jokes, so they get a pass; whoever was
>running Clark et al. clearly was setting them up to fail and so turned
>them into cartoonish supervillains.

Gotta chime in with a 'bwuh?' here. Let's keep in mind that, over a span of about twenty years, Clark and his allies managed to take complete control of the Earth Alliance, legitimately (This guy got elected to be EA president), then proceeded to do the same to nearly the entire Federation. They poisoned the relationship between Starfleet and the WDF, had enough minions and allies in the Federation Senate that they got away with dissolving their member nations, and by 2407, were close to expanding their telepath slavery program to the rest of the Federation. And it got worse from there. And for almost all that time, the heroes only managed relatively minor victories.

They lasted twenty years, and yes, the WDF and the IPO took them down in the end. But by then, they had infested the Federation to the point that one of the largest, most powerful, and formerly most respectable nations in explored space, was so rotted and corrupt that there was no salvaging it.

I'm not seeing them as a joke.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter