Basically, Jon Stewart is great, and I'm a huge fan, but when he announced this rally he did something I believe deeply destructive and have written about before - false equivalences. Glenn Greenwald, however, just wrote the post that I wanted to write, so I'm just going pass it on, quoting him:
I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too -- the proposition that Bush is a "war criminal" -- is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.There's really not much more to say than that. False equivalencies are deeply destructive to our discourse because they give incentives to keep lying and be more and more extreme. As long as the media says you're as bad as the other guys, and being that bad works for your goals, all the incentives point to sinking lower and lower. We need to keep pointing out to all involved in the media that while it's tempting to pump up your objective, centrist bona fides in order to be taken seriously, in the long run, every time we do it, it is incredibly harmful.
Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party. The claim that Bush is "a war criminal" has ample basis, and it's deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one's centrist bona fides.
It's admirable to want to apply the same standards to both sides, but straining to manufacture false equivalencies doesn't accomplish that; sometimes, honestly applying the same standards to each side will result in a finding that one side, at least in that regard, is actually worse. When that's the case, a person engaged in truly independent, non-ideological inquiry -- rather than the pretense of such -- will expressly acknowledge the imbalance, not concoct an equivalency where it doesn't exist. By stark contrast, Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" seems extremely well-focused and on-point. (emphasis added)
