Restoring Whose Sanity? Redux

Last week I published a post on the Stewart/Colbert Rally and the problems I had with the false equivalency drawn between the left and the right.  On Friday night Bill Maher made the same point far more eloquently.  This issue has special resonance after the suspension by MSNBC of Keith Olbermann for making campaign contributions to Democrats.  Whether or not one believes MSNBC overreacted, as Rachel Maddow stated, this incident should lay to rest the "conflation of Fox News and what the rest of us do for a living . . . . Hosts on Fox News raise money for Republican candidates. They endorse them explicitly, they use their Fox News profile to headline fundraisers . . . They run as a political operation" not a news organization.  Here is the transcript of Maher's comments:

And finally, New Rule, if you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something.  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 the 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.  There's a difference between a mad man, and a madman.
Now, getting over 200,000 people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement, and gave me hope.  And what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August!  Although it weighed the same.
But the message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media would just stop giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity.  It was all non-partisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side, forgetting that Obama tried that, and found out there are no moderates on the other side.
When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is dominated by people on the right who believe Obama's 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's 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 right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle, which is now not the middle anymore.  That's the reason health care reform is so watered down; it's Bob Dole's old 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.
But it's not.  I know that because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now.  All of us who live out here have had that experience.  Oh look, there's a mountain there!  Government, led by liberal Democrats, passed laws which changed the air I breathe for the better.  OK, I'm for them!  And not for the party that is, as we speak, plotting to abolish the EPA.  And I don't need to pretend that both sides have a point here.  And I don't care what left or right commentators say about it; I only care what climate scientists.
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 sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too!"  No, he said, "I have a dream, they have a nightmare!"  This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob.  Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend that we're as mean or greedy or short-sighted or just plain batshit as they are.  And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church!