I thought it was the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’, a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the ever bizarre Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honour.
Jon Stewart is (a hugely successful) liberal leaning comedian – surly Mr Maher should focus his ranting towards the Democrats, not entertainers?

@1 Antony: “Jon Stewart is (a hugely successful) liberal leaning comedian – surly Mr Maher should focus his ranting towards the Democrats, not entertainers?”

Most American attempts at political humour (Hunter S Thompson excepted) leave me dry. But surly Bill Maher made me smile. I smiled more than I should have because of his resemblance to Julian Assange.

I’d assume that surly Bill Maher delivered his message to an audience that included Sanity protestors or their mates. A message to the Democrat protestors and the people that they supported.

I must admit my admiration for the Sanity protest. Stewart rounded up thousands of people with a single argument: please shut up and get on with life.

I thought it was the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’, a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the ever bizarre Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honour.

It was – but the message he had there at the rally was that both sides are just as bad…

The Tea Party are good at polarised politics, it’s them verses the socialists after all. Jon Stewart was just trying a bit of charm to bring them out to a position where they would have to justify their position. And fail to do so.

Is this the same credulous Bill Maher who swallows and regurgitates ignorant nonsense on a near-weekly basis, be it on islamic boys’ names or vaccine safety?

He’s, basically, a complete fuckwit on the same intellectual level as O’Reilly himself.

The video’s no longer available (0850 hours Sunday). So HBO are as good as Comedy Central when it comes to stopping folks seeing their content.

Well there certainly does seem to be an excess of insanity and a shortage of sanity in US politics, so I think he chose the non-partisan angle so as not to interfere with making that point. At the same time, there’s no pretending that it wasn’t the Republicans where everybody was saying the insanity mainly lies – it wasn’t as if all the placards about Fox News, Glenn Beck etc. were matched by an equal number against left-wing outlets.

You might like to have seen a rally in which left wingers gather to proclaim that Republicans and bad and crazy, but that would have turned it into something else and would have excluded sane centrists and conservative who feel everybody has gone batshit crazy. Personally I love that the did it like they did it.

Is this really a “smackdown” though? It comes across more as forthright advice from a concerned friend and fellow traveller.

@Sunny Hundal

“It was – but the message he had there at the rally was that both sides are just as bad…”

I don’t think it was the main message. Nitpicking with a topic like this is a waste and isn’t exactly progressive. The rally mainly was a swipe at the US media as a whole which is dominated in its entirety by extreme, polarizing, bias, ill-informed opinions. If there is the assumption that the message were that ‘both sides are bad’, then Stewart was referring to the news media outlets (even the democratic ones) that fail to show any sort of moderation and true debate. See Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire.

I’m with Stewart on this, it isn’t progressive to be distancing the left and right further and further apart. Does Maher think all republican’s are the same? He basically insinuates all republicans are mean and greedy and short-sighted. Is there no such thing as a liberal republican? He’s confused, he needs to watch the Daily Show himself and observe the amount of Republicans Stewart interviews himself that are moderate people. Maher is a a buffoon.

Maher isn’t clever or influential enough to do what Stewart has done. If the rally truly had one firm point to argue, then the rally would lose it’s appeal. That’s why the rally was such a success because it could cover a whole range of points. I don’t think Maher isn’t worth giving any time of the day for. He’s a man that can not even distinguish Islam from Islamism, and he’s meant to be on the Left? He shouldn’t be setting the agenda for how liberals should be acting. He is precisely the type of person on the left that Stewart is mocking in fact.

AND, he says that scientists are the people worth paying attention to, with regards to climate change, not who is on the left or the right. Yet he claimed during the swine flu ‘epidemic’ that vaccinations were a government conspiracy, failing to take into account the vaccinations were developed by scientists. The man is a joke.

I have to agree with other commenters. As an antivaxxer and PETA advisor, he’s exactly the kind of person you would expect to take a dislike to conducting politics in a sane and rational manner. As other people have noted, Stewart’s rally did not say both sides were as bad as each other, he said that both sides had people who went too far. It was very obvious that Tea Partiers and Fox News were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the craziness.