He heard the call, and he announced "A Rally to Restore Sanity," terming it "a million moderate march." Here's the announcement below. I won't spoil the jokes, but I love his suggested signs.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Rally to Restore Sanity | ||||
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Now I'm sure there are a few of you devoted Glenn Beck watchers who consider him an intelligent truth-sayer who's well-informed on the issues. To you, I can only say, "Fuck off."
I'm sorry. That came out wrong. My point is, that you uneducated reactionary folk might take umbridge at me calling myself a moderate. And I admit, that on today's political spectrum I probably sound like a hippie liberal. That's only because the Right has moved so far to the right in the last ten years that my ven diagram barely covers most of their now-extreme values. I assure you, just because I'm not willing to believe anything Rush or Fox says, that doesn't make me biased against the Right. I think there are well-meaning conservatives with decent values and ideals. They've merely sold out because it's politically expedient (*cough*McCain).
I hope that Stewart's rally gets a lot of coverage, if only in the hopes that it will encourage more moderates to come out of the closet. Nothing is going to get done as long as these two sides only demonize each other and obstruct any progress from being made. It's not about doing good, it's about winning. As we've seen, Karl Rove can denounce a Tea Party candidate as a nut and a liar one day, and then, when she wins the nomination to be the Republican candidate, he turns around and endorses her.
Because it's not about anything other than winning. If Joe McCarthy were resurrected today and held a commanding lead in the primary polls under the "I want to lock up everyone who joined a union, heard of a union, or has worked for Western Union" party, the Republicans would get behind him faster than the Flash getting freaky with his wife in the bedroom.
Why won't that happen with the Democrats? Because they can't get their shit together on anything. After the last two years, it's pretty clear that you could play a game of "Horse" with a Democrat, spot him the "H, O, R" and the "S" and he'd still get his ass kicked! Even with a black guy leading the team! So every November I die a little inside when I have to chose between the party of no higher principles, and the party of no effective action.
Issues like mosque construction, socialism (which is only imminent if you'd have called the Clinton Administration socialist as well), and terror babies are just election year rhetoric with virtually no basis in reality. It's designed to aim for the emotions rather than the truth of the situation. And people on both sides of the aisle are equally guilty of it.
Meanwhile, those of us in the middle just look and shake our heads - and get attacked by BOTH sides when we inevitably have to point out it ain't black and white.
So that's why this rally interests me. Do I think it'll make much impact? No, not really. But maybe it'll convince many of those moderates like myself that we are not alone. While it seems the whole country has gone mad around us, it's really just an increasingly vocal (but still relatively small) percentage of assholes, and a large group of well-meaning people who have merely been misinformed.
So if I was in Washington DC this Halloween, I'd definitely be going as a moderate - which I guarantee will scare the hell out of my conservative and liberal friends. Because we don't fit in their neat little box.
I leave you with this song from River of Dreams, one of my favorite Billy Joel albums:
