Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert riffed and giggled, strutted, sang and otherwise carried a big shtick for the first 100-plus minutes of their two-hour “Restore Sanity and/or Fear” rally on Saturday. And the tens of thousands of people who thronged the National Mall ate it up.
The fake anchors gave Medals of Reasonableness (Stewart) and Fear Awards (Colbert) and presented musical acts ranging from gospel singer Mavis Staples to Yusef Islam, the balladeer once known as Cat Stevens. The high-production variety show, complete with the iconic US Capitol and a clear blue sky as a backdrop.
Then, with some 20 minutes remaining, Stewart got to the point of the extravaganza aimed at those watching it live, or on TV and computers worldwide: To consider the frayed notion of civic discourse seen through the shrill prism of a right/left rant-o-rama video montage on jumbo screens, featuring, among others, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and James Carville.
Thousands answered the call of comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Saturday and crowded the National Mall to participate in the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”
And so he explained what exactly he had wrought. “This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith. Or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.”
Read More: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/10/30/restore-sanity-and-or-fear-rallyers-frolic-on-national-mall/
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