Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Hold Press Conference To Restore Sanity
» 48 comments
After a very long day of singing, video montages, paper maché effigies, and plenty of fear and/or sanity, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert met the press for one last time as the ringleaders of their joint rally to answer questions on crowd organization, their core message, and the surprising supporting character of the event, Rick Sanchez.
Colbert explained the rigor to which both he and Stewart would be submitted to in the coming days, traveling to do shows after the massive organizational effort to organized this event. Stewart, meanwhile, explained the process of his writing– just hunkering down the night before (Colbert “improvised everything I did)– and his method of establishing his own boundaries as a comedian.
Stewart was also asked about his relationship with Rick Sanchez after “the incident,” to which Stewart first joked that he had a “very anti-Semetic” conversation with him several days later, and then clarified that the real conversation was cordial and that “we all have those days.”
The post-rally presser via CNN below:
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48 comments
Colbert: “This was a really nice validation of what we were thinking.”
So this was the rally to restore egos. Awesome.
This was a pretty good function for two comedians.
It won’t be significant, or even taken seriously, by a huge number of young voters, let alone the 85% of mature voters.
I’ll be actually interested in a few things:
(1) What Glen Beck says, which I expect will be complimentary.
(2) The condition in which they leave the Mall, which I expect will be a big mess.
(3) The restraint which liberal pundits use in NOT exaggerating attendance, message, or impact.
(4) The recognition which conservative pundits use in NOT trashing the rally.
Annnnd how is that different from Beck’s rally?
Beck’s rally was to restore honor and faith. It was respectable and he did raise money for a good cause. But there had to be a lot of ego involved for him to think this would be successful and it was.
Same goes for today’s rally. The message was: tone it down. There was money raised as well, but…yeah, Stewart and Colbert have big egos. Their celebrity gives that to them. Doesn’t make either of them bad people, if it is for a good cause.
The part that really seems silly is that Stewart doesn’t realize that he IS part of the media, not safely outside of it, as he claims. Just because he’s a comedian doesn’t mean he isn’t perceived as part of the mainstream dialog and taken seriously for what he says. Watch the 24 hours news channels and see how many times they play clips from his show. He’s every bit as much of a pundit as Glenn Beck, and, I would argue, not really that much different in tone and temperament. The only real difference is one guy admits he’s a comedian and the other only goes on comedy tours. Stewart helped create the very culture that he is criticizing and critiquing every time he took a quote out of context for jokes or played a clip of a conservative saying something he disagrees with and then smirked into the camera and shouted “Fuck you!” as everyone in his audience simultaneously swooned with adulation?
Jon Stewart is right to critique it all, but it’s not as if his are the only clean hands in the debate. He throws as much dirt as anyone, and it’s not really fair that he gets a free pass on it all because at the end of the day he can say, “Well, I’m just a comedian.” Really, if his show was on MSNBC, would it be any different?
Jon, you’re part of the problem, not the solution. It’s too late; this genie isn’t going back in the bottle. And it’s hard to believe that you really want that anyway.
It would actually be nice if the ratings for a few of the worst hate-shows went down, at least for a couple of days.
But I have no faith that will happen.
Like the poster above me said…
I CANT WAIT TO SEE WHAT GLENN BECK HAS TO SAY ABOUT THIS!
*facepalm*
1) I would expect no less from Mr. Beck.
2) We shall see, but you may be suprised. You may not.
3) Yeah, the probably will. They would be good in using the phrase “a lot”. That would be accurate.
4) I doubt most will trash it. If they are fair, they will see it for what is was, a non-political rally to promote a calmer discourse.
Save it.
Jon Stewart ran a charity for the Mall over the last 2 months, enough to clean it one hundred times and replant all the grass.
The mall made out fine from this rally, tyvm.
I doubt that will happen. Olbermann’s ratings can’t get much lower.
Great Line:
‘We Live Now In Hard Times, Not End Times’
“All thinking men are atheists.”
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 —1961)
“Restore Sanity” = “Vote Democrat”
Seriously, if you all cant see thats whats going on here, then I feel sorry for you.
Right, tone it down until Republicans are in charge again. Then it will be back to the vitriol we saw from guys like Stewart all through the Bush years.
Sir Francis Bacon
“An atheist is a man who looks through a telescope and tries to explain what he can’t see…..”
O.A. Battista :
Atheism is the death of hope, the suicide of the soul…..”
Anonymous
“Christians are douche bags”
Anonymous
This game is fun and completely unproductive…
Drone, why is it that the right wingers at the rally found something positive and productive in it but you and other right wingers here found absolutely nothing of any value. There was good stuff for everyone there but you are determined to sit in your own little negative world stomping your feet cause it can’t be just your way and only your way
YOU are a cocksucking lib who eats shit from Obama’s toilet and shares it with his family and fellow libs.
You mean like Stewart, the left and Democrats about the tea parties for the last 2 years?
If you think “The Silence of the Lambs” was a horrible site, wait until you see “The Screaming of the Libs”
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, the libs just could not stop their hate for one day- not for one day!
“Most of those pouring into the Mall Saturday appeared to be younger than 35, and the signs they carried showed a decidedly left-wing bent: “I hope this isn’t a trap,” “I masturbate to Christine O’Donnell,”Communism was a red herring.”
Most signs fit with the happy-go-lucky ethos of the rally, but others were crude. One sign had Hitler mustaches on pictures of Sarah Palin, Eric Cantor, Glenn Beck and John Boehner. The message said, “Afraid yet?” This is particularly insulting to Cantor, who is Jewish and in line to become House Majority Leader if Republicans win next week.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44413.html#ixzz13t9fL9tn
Hey its your choice Drone
See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!
Not what I said. I don’t want insanity with Republicans in charge either. I was just as against people comparing Bush to Hitler as I am comparing Obama to Hitler.
Yeah, I am a liberal, but there were a lot of liberals I was embarrassed for during the Bush years. Although, during the first Bush years, I was actually a Bush supporter.
Isn’t it funny how contradictory we all sound?
There are people that ask Where was the Tea Party during the Bush years?
There are also people asking, “Where was the call for sanity during the Bush years?
Oh, the irony.
How many houses are you haunting this year, dear?
Who committed suicide by blowing his alcohol soaked brains out.
What a refreshing change to see a large group of Americans gather not motivated by fear, hate and intolerance. Most of us knew that the 87,000 who gathered for the Beckerhead’s Heresy Hootnanny did not represent us.
Here, let’s talk about hate: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/10/15-most-bizarre-photos-from-jon.html
There were many people on the right who disliked Bush’s spending. All you have to do is search. Here’s one: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=conservatives+grumbling+over+bush’s+spending&aq=f&aqi=&aql=f&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=2304850557947867
Salman Rushie, the author of the Satanic Verses, said Yusuf Islam, who was a STAR at Stewart/Colbert’s rally wrote that Yusuf Islam wanted him murdered for criticizing Islam and Muhammad;
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/100061519/yusuf-islam-aka-cat-stephens-accused-of-backing-salman-rusdie-fatwah-appears-at-rally-to-restore-sanity/
And here’s Salman Rushdie’s own take, in a 2007 letter to the Telegraph, on what Yusuf meant:
Cat Stevens wanted me dead
However much Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam may wish to rewrite his past, he was neither misunderstood nor misquoted over his views on the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses (Seven, April 29). In an article in The New York Times on May 22, 1989, Craig R Whitney reported Stevens/Islam saying on a British television programme “that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, ‘I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing’.”
He added that “if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, ‘I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is’.”
In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr Whitney added, Stevens/Islam, who had seen a preview of the programme, said that he “stood by his comments”.
Let’s have no more rubbish about how “green” and innocent this man was.
Salman Rushdie, New York
I thought it was a good rally. I enjoyed seeing the people and Stewart and Cobert were obviously delighted with response of the crowd and enjoying themselves.
For anyone interested, the full press availability is archived at the following addy;
http://press.org/sanity/fear
I’m watching it now.
OK – Now that I’ve seen the full presser, it’s only about five or six questions longer than the CNN clip. There were a couple of good answers and it’s probably worth a full viewing or embed, but I’ll clip the following exchange;
Q: Do you think people should vote and do you think you should have expressed that message from the stage?
Stewart: I think people should do…
Colbert: they want
Stewart: …what moves them. That’s not my place to make that choice for them, that’s theirs.
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In the interest of fairness I have to say this….I stand somewhat corrected.
I had expected this to be a tool that the dems would use with gusto for their own political purposes. To some degree it was (Media Matters went around getting 15,000 signatures to boycott Fox News advertisewrs. Heh. Good luck with that and Dem scavengers worked the crowd.) but for the most part it was relatively benign and seemed like a total waste of time with music and comedy like all parties should be.
In short – it seemed like it was mostly fun for a lot of people.
There were some ugly signs carried by some serious imbeciles, but this gathering had no corner on the idiot market.
Stewart gets his props, too. It would have been easy for him to lead this as a political rally – he didn’t, and his speech at the end was pretty damn good.
So…I stand corrected. Mostly, anyway. Preconceived notions often work out that way, don’t they?
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I thought the whole thing was a rip off of South Park’s 100th episode in which the town is split between war protesters and war hawks who eventually have to share a stage and get along.
You just can’t make a comment without proving what a POS you are.
By ‘us’, the King means the very most extreme, rabid, foaming at the mouth lunatic left wingers.
Well, now that we’ve had the competing rallies and elections come Nov.2, Republicans will be held accountable. After they take control of the House, they will no longer be able to just scream and hide behind Tea Party signs. They’re going to have to become grown-ups.
Arkansas Steve said:
(2) The condition in which they leave the Mall, which I expect will be a big mess.
Save it.
Jon Stewart ran a charity for the Mall over the last 2 months, enough to clean it one hundred times and replant all the grass.
The mall made out fine from this rally, tyvm.
LOL!
How can you vote this down you absolute tit heads? 48 people think this is a negative comment lol.
Jesus you guys are dumb.
That certainly leaves YOU out?
Fox News quotes Hemingway, a guy who blew his brains out. Foxy is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Unfortunately, the press conference was delayed until the large writing staffs of both Stewart and Colbert had enough time to sober up and write something for both men to say.
I think you’re mistaken. It’s too late to have a huge effect on this election, but I hope it’s a small beginning of the public rejecting the extremism in political language.
He started off being classy and then went the other way really quickly, even before the rally. We’ll see what he has to say after the fact.
Jon asked people to pick up. We had a trash bag and picked up our area which looked pretty good. Stuff piled up around the containers which couldn’t hold it all. I was disappointed to notice that about two blocks away from mall the trash bins on the street were overflowing with trash around them. A product of just so many people in town I suppose.
It was an excellent rally. both entertaining , fun, and meaningful. Basically, a very good spirit in the crowd.
I’ve already seen Hannity and posters here trying to trash the rally by bringing up 20 year old comments by Yusaf Cat Stevens Islam. It’s pretty feeble and transparent. IMO.
Decent of you to say so. See, that reasonable thing doesn’t hurt.
The same thing was done to Beck with John Hagee.
I can’t say that I think the rally was “meaningful” in any sense other than a concert in the park might be meaningful.
Judging from the posts here, it certainly hasn’t had an impact on moderating the type of hyperbolic and childish exchanges that the rally focused upon (your behavior is always mature and cordial), but it was a good show and I enjoy watching folks get out and have a great time.
stoogedudes says:
“Beck’s rally was to restore honor and faith. It was respectable and he did raise money for a good cause. ”
It also was political. THE purpose of the black robe Republican regiment is to GOTV of the far right voters.
http://www.sharethisurlaboutglennbeck.com/2010/09/glenn-becks-black-robe-republican.html
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