"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 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."
"When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is 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 to the 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 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."
"Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capitol, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those Southern sheriff's with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds, they have a point, too!" No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare."
Also, for the illiterate, here's Glenn Greenwald explaining to Lawrence O'Donnell why moving to the right is not a blueprint for success for Democrats:
Good stuff, especially the bits about unions, "reverse racism," and war crimes. Jon Stewart's dismissal of Maher et al.'s criticisms of the rally was pretty weak, too. The fact is that the Daily Show has pretty much lost its critical backbone since Obama's election. They put the last administration under heavy scrutiny, but now, suckers that they are for Obama's emollient words, all they have to offer are the usual "moderate" liberal platitudes about working together, gradual change, etc. Many people disliked the Bush administration's brazenness in pursuing heinous policies, but to my mind the present government is all the more despicable for the gap between its representation of itself and its actions. And all the ridiculous slander about Obama's "socialism" only serves to confuse matters further. I don't see why critical attention to the incumbent administration should stop just because Obama is/was "our guy" - if anything, it should be all the greater for precisely that reason.
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