The argparse module supports "subparsers," which allow CLI tools to support invocation of subcommands (much like the svn or hg programs). For these subcommands, it is often useful to allow multiple names for the same command. For instance, in Mercurial, "hg blame" does the same thing as "hg annotate".

You should be able to create subparsers with command aliases, like this:
>>> subparsers.add_parser("annotate", aliases=('ann', 'blame'))

The help message for the program should display the aliases alongisde the command names.

I'm attaching an example script that adds an Action to the library to accomplish this. This isn't a patch, but if this approach seems right to other people, I'll turn it into a patch.

Here's this bug on argparse's old tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/argparse/issues/detail?id=23