Today on the Mall, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and thousands of others (including Silver Spring bureau chief Brian and his lovely wife Chi) will be rallying to the cause of Restoring Sanity and Keeping Fear Alive (?!). If you're regular viewers of the Daily Show and Colbert Report, you know all about what's going on -- and if you don't, you're keeping company with the "concerned," humorless media who have multiple critiques of the rally, but who, gosh darn it, just don't get it. Counted among the latter are such pearl-clutchers as Kaplan Daily's reliably "moderate" Anne Applebaum, and critics Paul Farhi and Carlos Lozada. We must be reminded, these are Serious People, whose panties must be disentangled from their posteriors whenever decorum is breached.
As Ryan Kearney notes, the rally "has few opponents outside the Fox news studio." Few opponents, yes, but the usual share of Concerned Thoughtful Voices.
UPDATE: If you look at the crowd pictures (eg., at Huffington Post, MSNBC, etc. it appears that the gathering was an order of magnitude greater than the Boo Hoo the Hoot nutfest in August - looked like several hundred thousand to our Silver Spring bureau chief who was live on the scene; packed from one side of the Mall to the other from before 3rd Street to beyond 7th Street. Let's see how it (down)plays with the "mainstream media" tonight and tomorrow.
UPDATE II: HuffPo reports CBS and Canada's CTV are pegging the crowd at over 200,000 (more than double CBS' estimate for the Boo Hoo the Hoot Nutfest in August).
