I watched the hugely-attended rally yesterday from the Mall in D.C. and it looked like a real blast. The crowd size knocked Glenn Beck's religious revival meeting in the dirt, the music was great, the jokes were funny and the overall point was well made.
Well, sort of.
In a political season that has been more venomous and mean-spirited than I can ever remember (and bear in mind it has only been two years since McCain foisted his lip-stick wearing Alaskan pit bull on us all), one would think that at a rally that attracted northwards of 300,000 like-minded folks to come together and be heard, they would have come up with a better message. At least one that was better than what was in all essence, just another version of "can't we all just get along?" I mean really, I thought this was supposed to be a clarion call against the 24/7 news cycle of hate and fear-mongering that pollutes the airwaves, a sort of collective Howard Beale moment.
Apparently not.
Look, I understand that John Stewart and his network had to tread a very fine line between political parody and actually picking a political side, but when the premise of the whole rally is based on two shows that relentlessly take the piss out of the republican party and their right-wing media machine, you would have thought that a 'we're not taking anymore of this shit' message was pretty much a given. Instead we got a watered-down, almost generic, 'all-of-the-talking-heads-on-cable-are-as-bad-as-each-other' message that is both disingenuous and almost entirely incorrect. That's almost as intellectually dishonest as agreeing with the 'Liberal Media' myth. (Speaking of whom, the M$M not surprisingly, almost entirely boycotted the rally because, you know, it wasn't a "serious news event").
At the end of the day I'm not sure what anyone realistically expected to come out of the rally, other than a damn good time being had by all, and everyone being agreeable and nice to everyone else, but I do know this; three hundred thousand volunteers going door-to-door in a coordinated 'Get out the Vote' campaign might have been a hell of alot more productive in getting a positive result for the country come Tuesday night.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong about this, but in the end I think it was just pissing in the wind. We shall see.
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