It needed to be said: The Rally to Restore Sanity was about nothing

As the absurd Keith Olbermann contretemps underscored, the idea of Left-Right equivalency is a fantasy, a right wing myth deliberately fabricated by the same conservative disinformation machine that has driven our politics increasingly fringeward. As Jon Stewart surely knows, there is no Liberal media conspiracy, no death panels, no $200M-a-day trips to the Taj Mahal, no Socialist in the White House, blah blah & blah. For Stewart to position himself equidistant between the Left and Right is to do a disservice to the very political sanity he was nominally attempting to revive. As Bill Maher put it on his show the other night:

The message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media stopped 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's a Socialist and people on the Left who believe 9/11's an inside job, but I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11's an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's a Socialist? All of them.

Here's the full clip:

The rest of the story: The Left vs. Jon Stewart? by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones 2010-11-08).