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Both Sides are Equally Extreme?

Posted on November 1st, 2010 by Staks

Over the weekend, Jon Stewart held the Rally to Restore Sanity and tomorrow is Election Day so I thought I would talk about this myth that both political parties are equally extreme.

Toward the end of the rally, Stewart gave his closing speech in which he talked about how people from both sides of the political divide work together everyday when merging from two lanes of traffic to one lane. This was a great point, but during the rally he tried to criticize both parties equally for the extremism in our political system as if to say that both sides were equally as extreme. In fact, that seemed to be the message many people got out of this rally and it is absolutely false.

The fact is that there is no liberal counterbalance to Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Fox and Friends, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Christine O’Donnell, etc. etc. I could go on all day with Republican extremists. Who is the most extreme liberal? Michael Moore? He is actually a moderate. He has only been labeled an extremist by right wing extremists.

The fact is that there really are no liberal extremists… at least not in the same way that there are conservative and libertarian extremists. Those who showed up at the Rally to Restore Sanity were mostly liberals and hopefully mostly realize that the extremism is really one-sided.

When Jon Stewart said that we are living in “hard times not end times,” I don’t think anyone on the liberal side actually believes we are living in the end times, but that is far the opinion of many on the more conservative side who really do believe that the end times are near. This of course only adds to their extremism.

The problem with Stewart’s message is that Democrats already compromise too much in our current political discourse and so criticizing us for being too extreme is not really helping. While the Republicans complained that Obama wouldn’t compromise even after he started from a compromised position and then only continued to compromise until his Health Care bill was pretty much what the Republicans proposed just few years ago, John Boehner and other elected Republicans have recently swore that when they get into power after this election there will be no compromises.

Stewart said that there was only one or two assholes who would cut people off when merging, but the fact is that in politics most of the Republicans have just been cutting everyone off and Democrats have been just sitting there unable to move out of fear of getting into an accident. The Republicans have already shown that they are not about merging into traffic peacefully by being the Party of no. Currently every bill that the Democrats put up the Republicans vote against even if it was a bill they suggested. Obama has been able to get one or two Republican votes on a few issues, but for the most part, the American people are being held hostage to the Republican assholes who won’t let anyone else merge into traffic.