Ten years ago, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and thousands of their shows’ most loyal fans took over the National Mall to throw their support behind a common cause. Having skewered American politics for years — Stewart with flustered liberal rage, Colbert with a barely hyperbolic spoof of conservative pundits — the pair was fed up with the polarization of politics that seemed to be taking over their every waking moment. At the time, both comedians insisted at every opportunity that they were “just comedians” rather than the political soothsayers some wanted them to be. Maybe that’s why, just a few weeks away from the first midterm elections after Barack Obama’s presidential victory, Stewart and Colbert combined forces to throw an event of epic proportions with no message beyond “it sure would be nice if everyone was less intense!” Determined to maintain some level of moderation between two increasingly extreme, disparate sides of debate, Stewart and Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” lay blame for the dire tenor of national debate at the feet of both Democrats and Republicans. In their attempts to stay as neutral as possible, they equivocated so hard that they completely, deliberately ignored the actual issues that were dividing the country with such force.