Arianna appeared on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday as part of a roundtable with Dick Armey, George Will, Cokie Roberts, Jonathan Karl, and Donna Brazile.
The discussion, naturally, began with Jon Stewart's Rally To Restore Sanity.
"Should there be partisanship?" asked host Christiane Amanpour. "Is it an inevitable role of society, a fact of life?"
"The rally was not against partisanship as such," Arianna replied. "It was against demonizing your opponents. He said specifically in his speech at the end -- which I though was magnificent -- of course we'll have animus, of course we'll have disagreement, but we don't have to turn each other into enemies."
"Obviously we need civility," Dick Armey said. "I thought yesterday was fun day. I was quite amused at watching the national comics stand up and decry with such sincerity that which they do every day on their shows. I thought it was so remarkable: 'I want you all in America to stop acting like we do on our show every night with our militant vilification of everyone with whom we have a disagreement."
"Actually, Dick, I don't know the last time you watched the show," Arianna interjected, "but that is precisely what they are not doing."
"What they vilified, in a civil, reasonable way, was the fact that the media has stopped being what they call, what Jon Stewart calls, 'the immunity of our democracy.' And that is something that goes back to Jefferson. The fact that what we choose to do with our magnifying glass in the media matters -- it will only magnify the extremism."
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Rally to Restore Sanity | Facebook
Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity draws marchers from across ...
Silverlincoln didn't say they know what all women feel.
Far from demonizing people, the Daily celebrates their absurdity, and it gives them a chance to speak for themselves. After months of going to town on Blagojovich's absurdity, they had him on the show, and they had the entire interview uncut on the website afterwards-- something you can't expect from the cable news. They didn't demonize him, far from it-- they mocked him, they called him out, they laughed themselves silly but they hosted him and they let him do his best to communicate himself too.
If we could do that with each other-- and stop trying to eradicate those who wouldn't take us as seriously as we like to take ourselves-- we could live better lives. If we could just disagree without needing to wipe the disagreeable out of our country and out of our lives and out of their own beliefs, they wouldn't need the hate machines to protect them from the rest of the world. The hate machines would look like the tinfoil hat creations they truly are, and people would lose interest beyond their entertainment value. All we have to do is remove the threatening atmosphere that lends them a credibility they should never really have.
And when Bush rolled out his drug plan Republicans didn't even try to find one dime to pay for it; instead the rubber stamp Republican congress just piled it onto the debt again. And right up until the election in 2006, Republicans were so pleased with themselves that they spoke glowingly of the coming "permanent Republican majority". But when Democrats passed healthcare they worked hard for a year to find ways to pay for it. So please, conservatives, stop talking about the debt, because you have no credibility on the subject.
Furthermore, Obama's economy is adding jobs in his 2nd year. Reagan's economy did not start adding jobs until his 3rd year. So Obama is 1 year ahead of Reagan. And in Reagan's 2nd year the unemployment rate was 11% compared to the current 9.5%. And regardless of what Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh say, the stimulus created 1.5 million jobs; maybe it seem small because of the millions more who lost their jobs on the Republican watch.
Torture perverts “innocent until proven guilty”. It begins with “guilty until proven innocent” and then provides no way for you to prove your innocence because it’s impossible to prove a negative. How would you prove that you don’t have a terror plot in your head? You will be cruelly and unusually punished for being presumed guilty of having an idea in your head based on the hunch of the guesser-in-chief. You will receive no trial. You will have no lawyer. You will be kept in a secret off-shore prison, and if you’re lucky, you’re friends and families will not be swept into the mess. To them, you will have simply disappeared. It’s a step backwards to a time before 1776…brought to you by Republicans. Bush recently said in Michigan that he would do it again. Go vote!