Last night, Bill Maher went off on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally for Sanity, and the resulting monologue was predictably funny and utterly brilliant. He's not completely discounting the impact of the rally-he's psyched that it had twice the attendance of Glenn Beck's. But he makes the important point that the Rally didn't: the right wing and the left wing are not separate but equal entities, taking down the false dichotomy between the two, and criticizing the Rally for even suggesting as much. "Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments," he said. "This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Awesome. Check it:
Last June, when Rolling Stone published Michael Hastings' article which ended the career of Obama's Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- an article which was just awarded the prestigious Polk Award -- the attacks on Hastings were led not by military officials but by some of Hastings' most celebrated journalistic colleagues. The New York Times' John Burns fretted that the article "has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations" and accused Hastings of violating "a kind of trust" which war reporters "build up" with war Generals; Politico observed that a "beat reporter" -- unlike the freelancing Hastings -- "would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal's remarks"; and an obviously angry Lara Logan of CBS News strongly insinuated (with no evidence) that Hastings had lied about whether the comments were on-the-record and then infamously sneered: "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has." Here's Jon Stewart last year mocking the revealing media disdain for Rolling Stone and Hastings in the wake of their McChrystal story.
America cannot expect a bunch of disenfranchised park-dwellers to come up with a solution to its economic woes -- they have a political ruling class to do that.
Since the beginning of the Obama administration, Stewart has interviewed more conservative pundits than liberal ones. (Remember when fans fretted he'd have trouble finding ways to be funny under the new president?) It may be because it's simply easier to tangle with an ideological adversary than to needle a compatriot. A clash of ideas is always more entertaining than an echo chamber.