Enter Bill Maher, and his "New Rules" response to the Rally - he says it so much better than I ever could!
New Rule: If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something. Now, with all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and the reasonable. And not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties.Keith Olbermann is right when he says he’s not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts. The other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance’s sake; that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right; that unions are just as powerful as corporations; that reverse-racism is just as damaging as racism. There’s a difference between a mad man and a madman.Now, getting over 200,000 people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope. And what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the mall in August. Although it weighed the same.But, the message of the rally, as I heard it, was that, if the media would just stop giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that and found out there are no moderates on the other side.When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the right who believe Obama is a socialist and people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can’t name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But, Republican leaders who think Obama is a Socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin, all of them. It’s now official Republican dogma. Like tax cuts pay for themselves, and gay men just haven’t met the right woman.As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded, but thinking Bush is a war criminal, that’s the opinion of General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army’s investigation into Abu Ghraib.You see, Republicans keep staking out a position that is further and further right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which is now not the middle anymore. That’s the reason healthcare reform is so watered down. It’s Bob Dole’s old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade. It was the first President Bush’s plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now, the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it’s a hoax.But it’s not. I know that because I’ve lived in LA since ’83, and there’s been a change in the city. I can see it now. Yeah. All of us who live out here have had that experience. “Oh, look, there’s a mountain there.” Governments led by liberal Democrats passed laws which changed the air I breathe for the better. Okay, I’m for them, and not for the party that is, as we speak, plotting to abolish the EPA. And I don’t need to pretend that both sides have a point here. And I don’t care what left or right commentators say about it. I only care what climate scientists say about it.Two opposing sides don’t necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn’t say, “Remember, folks, those Southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds, they have a point, too!” No, he said, “I have a dream. They have a nightmare.” This isn’t “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob.”Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend that we’re as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit [crazy] as they are. And if that’s too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.
