Bill Maher on Jon Stewart’s false Left-Right equivalency

Update: (11/07/10) – The original YouTube video was yanked (shocking! Shocking, I tells ya!), so I’ve replaced it with a more secure version, below.

As I’ve said, I didn’t watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last Saturday, so I cannot really judge what was said in and of itself. But a prickly point of contention circulating the blogosphere is his closing speech, wherein Stewart made an appeal for moderation by essentially equivocating both sides of the media spectrum (implicitly referring to those old rivals, Fox News and MSNBC) as though both were equally dangerous, wrong and detrimental to the public discourse.

Of course, as many liberals have rather irately reacted, this is completely wrong. I have, myself, written a bit about how comparing MSNBC with Fox, as biased and passionate both may be, is really nothing short of lunacy, given how one is an honest(ly biased) news agency and the other is a thinly disguised propaganda machine for the Right. And such was what Bill Maher said in yesterday’s (Friday) broadcast of his show when he made it quite clear that, no, both sides are not as problematic as the other.

Moderation is one thing. Painting anyone who stands up for reason with passion as being just as deranged and dangerous as the crazies on the other side of the aisle is another. It’s flat-out bullshit.

(via @todayspolitics)