For the next couple of weeks, we'll be celebrating the upcoming Rally To Restore Sanity/March To Keep Fear Alive by highlighting the ways in which "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have long advocated reasonableness. You're invited to take part! Remember a "moment of sanity" that was dear to you? Send me an email and tell me about it!
______________
Multiple readers and several colleagues want to highlight Jon Stewart's serial skewering of the "Real America" trope, in which conservative commentators and politicians go out of their way to slag off large portions of America as being insufficiently "American" as the people who -- coincidentally, I'm sure! -- tend to deliver electoral college votes to the GOP. Poor New York City really can't catch a break, you know? Do we rally around New Yorkers because of the 9/11 attacks? Or do we make residents of the five boroughs out to be the secret enemy of the state! It really depends on the political season.
Nevertheless, it gets Stewart's back up and appropriately so. Take that time Sarah Palin said this:
PALIN: We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.
That elicited this reaction from Stewart: "So, if small towns are 'real America,' that would make big cities, like Washington, DC and New York City, the capitals of 'fake America.' The epicenter of 'fake America'... the, the... what's the word I'm looking for? The 'Ground Zero,' if you will, of 'anti-America.' I bet bin Laden feels like a real asshole."
It's some of the most painfully incivil stuff in the world, and happily, the folks over at "The Daily Show" have made a "real America" mash-up that does credit to their defense of all Americans.
Someone will probably say that all of you folks that are coming to the Rally aren't "real Americans," either!
WATCH:
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]