The Rally to Make Things Worse

I was afraid this would happen. The very title - "Rally to Restore Sanity" - screamed the failure to grasp the real problem: that only one side is insane, and that nothing short of the complete destruction of the already sane side will satisfy the bloodlust of the crazies.

Add to that Steve M.'s insight that the rally was not about politics, but rather television ratings, and you had a recipe for failure.

I hope PZ is wrong about this:

But in the end, I was disappointed. It was also an afternoon of false equivalence, of civility fetishism, of nothing but a cry about the national tone, of a plea for moderation. And you can guess what I think of moderation.

"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice." - Tom Paine

I don't want moderation, especially when the only people who will listen to Stewart and Colbert are the people on our shared side of the political aisle. I can understand where they're coming from; people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Andrew Breitbart are poison, Fox News is a propaganda organ without bounds working for the far right-wing, we've got evangelical Christians demanding the installation of a theocracy, and on and on and on. But who, exactly, do Stewart and Colbert regard as the equivalent of Beck and Limbaugh on the left? Is it Rachel Maddow? Amy Goodman? Keith Olbermann?

Once again, we have someone bravely standing up and telling the people on their own side to stop being dicks, while being vague on the names and specifics.

So I'm at a loss about what we're supposed to do in the world according to Jon Stewart. Hey, all you people working for gay and lesbian equality, all you women asking for equal pay, all you workers trying to unionize, all you peaceniks trying to end the war in Afghanistan, all you nurses and doctors and clinic workers trying to maintain reproductive freedom and keep women alive, all you teachers trying to teach science and history without censorship, all you citizens trying to build a rational health care policy, all you scientists and doctors who want our country to progress in medical research, all you damned secularists who want to keep religion out of our schools and government, hey, hey, HEY, you! Tone it down. Quit making such a fuss. You're too loud. Shush. You're as crazy as the teabaggers if you think your principles are worth fighting for.

Read the whole thing.