Useful Idiots

Roger L. Simon looks at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert having Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) perform at their rally. Because nothing says restoring sanity than inviting "a misogynist who won’t talk to women" and wishes that he could kill Salman Rushdie.

But I think there’s another explanation for Islam’s appearance and it’s much simpler: Stewart and Colbert are dumb and uniniformed. Although they pretend to be more, they are just mildly talented entertainers with the depth of a petri dish who rely on their writers to stoke them with material and ideas. And no one told them Cat Stevens supported killing a fellow artist merely for exercising free expression. And unlike many of you, they simply didn’t know themselves. They thought he was, you know, just a peaceful ex-hippie dude who went Islamic spiritual instead of zen. (Okay, that irritated some people, but so what? It would be nice to see them squirm.)

But Palin, the Tea Partiers, and you flyover country folks are the real rubes. Rubes in need of correcting. Simon continues

Of course these are the supposedly “cool” leaders of the liberal or progressive, call-it-what- you-want, movement right now. They are above the fray, smarter than the rest of us, and anxious to return us all to sanity.

Sanity is ignorance I guess.

Speaking of that... Charlie Martin uses his tricky evil math to figure out how many people showed up, and counter some laughable, feel-good, estimates on the part of the Mass Media. http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/so-how-much-sanity-was-there-in-d-c-yesterday/

The Beck rally covered roughly 2.4 million square feet and by AirPhotosLive’s own photographs large parts of that area were packed as densely as any overhead picture of Stewart/Colbert. The Stewart/Colbert rally had, at most, about 6/10th the space — 1.62 million square feet vs. 2.4 million. For it to have had that many people [215,000 by their estimate versus the 87,000 they said for Beck], they would have had to be packed about 6.7 times more densely than the densest parts of the Beck crowd.

Mean old math.

And from the comments... this bit of PJM policy is brilliant. Some sock-puppeteer (same comments as Chris, John, ect) complains about censorship. Martin's response?

No, you’re just an idiot who didn’t read the line “your comment is awaiting moderation” when you posted the first time. Luckily, PJM has a policy of allowing repetitious comments that complain about being censors, so when you make a fool of yourself it’s visible to everyone.

Niiiiice