Everybody's doing it

It seems everyone is doing it. So, while waiting for election results which I won't check for another hour or so, I figured I'd take a moment to offer my opinion on the Stewart/Colbert rally over the weekend.

That opinion is that it could be as well-attended as it was precisely because it was completely non-threatening, completely harmless, a homily-ridden exercise in self-congratulation about a self-proclaimed "reasonableness," a notion based entirely on a wholly bogus claim of a moral equivalence between right and left of a sort that would equate al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11 with Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple on the grounds that both involved destruction of property.

The quote that adorns the top of my blog is taken from Glenn Greenwald and says something totally alien to the mindset of the John Stewarts and Stephen Colberts of the world but remains true nonetheless: Passion and substance are not mutually exclusive. And frankly, despite their implicit claims to greater insight, it is those who think the proper answer to the bullies, bigots, and blowhards is to without exception rely on accommodation and polite conversation who do not understand the political and social world around them.

That does not mean, by the way, that I will stop watching either Stewart or Colbert (although in fact for various reasons I've been watching very little of them of late). They are funny and once in a while even informative. However, they are singularly lousy guides for political action and their rally proved it.