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I can’t report as to the mood on the ground, but from the view from my television on Saturday, the National Mall looked packed with rationality at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Musical guests ranging from The Roots to Tony Bennett performed, and appearances were made by the MythBusters, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and even R2D2. It was clear that, while the Rally didn’t necessarily have one definitive political statement-and that was part of its aim, to prove that people from all political affiliations can be in support of a polite national discourse-it did live up to its idea of being, essentially, a bigger, more star-packed version of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Estimates say that 215,000 people were on the National Mall to watch the Rally in person (for comparison, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s rally a few months ago had 87,000 attendees) and, if nothing else, it restored my faith that maybe the US hasn’t entirely succumb to fringe radical groups.
My personal favorite part was the most on-topic: the speech Jon Stewart gave at the very end of the rally, after all the guests had performed and all the hijinks had ensued.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cj_cY4Tgcs 425×344]You can watch the full rally in a series of video clips (including an epic moment in which Ozzy Osbourne and Yusuf/Cat Stevens hugged) over at the Comedy Central website here.
Also of note is Buzzfeed’s collection of the 100 best signs from the Rally (and satellite rallies across the nation) which you can see here.
Did you go? Did you watch it? What were your favorite parts?
Image courtesy the Huffington Post
