Slate’s Timothy Noah is butthurt about the Colbert and Stewart rallies, in a highly contrarian way of course. Wonkette:

Writer Timothy Noah is an old who will be having a bunch of youngs staying over at his house to go to this thing, and he is not happy about this! Don’t these children understand that parodying the teevee newscast or parodying the teevee news opinion show is funny, but parodying the political rally as a vehicle for your satire can never be done? Obviously not. But Dr. Comedy Timothy Noah does, and he also knows that you are not allowed to make fun of Teabaggers for being dumb. That sort of thing is mean!

Ben Smith has a truly execrable piece on the same general topic:

Stewart’s version of sanity is easily confused with condescension. Like donning a tricorn hat and belting country music to celebrate tea party victories last month. A typical shot at Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle earlier this month: “She wants to dissolve the Post Office and send all her messages through angels.” Surely, Angle has said some questionable things — but it’s probably still bad politics for the Democrats to be seen as “eggheads” (a term of derision used by Adlai Stevenson’s critics in the 1950s) and “pointy-headed liberals” (as they were known in the glory days of Spiro Agnew.)

I actually don’t believe that Ben Smith could possibly believe any of this, given that his work at the Daily News often had a Stewartesque tone to it. But you win the motherfucking morning by cranking out Halperinesque nonsense.

I think with Noah, it’s something different. He seems himself as a proud member of some kind of a club whose status depends on our political system being taken seriously, and this kind of thing undermines that. Also too, these pampered fucks get off on pretending to identify with mythical, serious, humorless middle Americans.

You see, Real Murkans don’t like irony or sarcasm. They like a good Bob Hope joke. Just something to chuckle along with as they leaf through their local Chamber of Commerce brochure and think about how hard their bosses have to work.