Oh, For Goodness Sake

Birfers And ‘Baggers On Parade Of Deception

Most reputable sources gave the event numbers of 60-70,000 or thousands or tens of thousands. Disreputable sources wanted it to be 1.5 million to 2 million, so they said it was 1.5 million to 2 million. That was easy.

Conservative activists, who organized a march on the U.S. Capitol today in protest of the Obama administration’s health care agenda and government spending, erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.”

Brendan Steinhauser, spokesman for FreedomWorks, said he did not know why Kibbe cited ABC News as a source.

As a result of Kibbe’s erroneous attribution, several bloggers and commenters repeated the misinformation.

And perplexed ABC’s reporter on the scene:

# have checked all of our coverage – ABC never reported 2 million. if you find it, send it to me. this is a total myth.about 11 hours ago from web
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# I don’t know where those numbers are coming from, but there’s no way there were 2 million there.about 11 hours ago from web
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# Tweeps, I’m confused. Keep hearing ppl say “ABC news is reporting 2 million” – where is this coming from? have not heard anyone say thatabout 11 hours ago from web

The Daily Mail published an article, “Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama’s spending in ‘tea-party’ demonstration,” which flooded right wing sites. A very similar Associated Press article entitled, “Thousands of downtown DC protesters blast Obama” was apparently based on the same scheduled press release, but updated to better reflect what actually happened.

Birther Major Stefan Cook spread the word on Free Republic:

Live Thread: 912DC March on Washington (We’re Having a Tea Party!)
9/12/2009 1:16:05 PM · 2,706 of 3,285
roaddog727 to who knows what evil?

Consider this:

2.0 million folks represents. 2/3 of a percent of the entire US population.

That is a significant.

This photo of the very successful October 4, 1997 Promise Keepers gathering appeared on Tweets and websites purporting it represented yesterday’s turnout.

Comparing over 1.5 million to tens of thousands:

So where was everybody? Just kidding. This was a good turnout, especially compared to the PUMAs’ epic failure last year.

It was well-advertised, certainly:

World Nut Daily was there:

Glenn Beck was not there, but the biggest coconut in the tree was not forgotten:

The second Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate was there, too:

And here was our Lady of Liberty herself, the Queen Bee of Birfistan, fresh from the steps of a Georgia courthouse, where she’d claimed her Plaintiff was being held captive in a Kansas FEMA camp, or something:

It’s all good. We were able to make progress on collecting FEMA camp names of future occupants. All your membership lists are belong to us.

– Gold Sponsor Tea Party Patriots is a website run by FreedomWorks staffers. When Tea Party Patriots list serv members objected to the 9/12 march symbol, they were rebuffed and told that all final decisions were made by FreedomWorks.

– Gold Sponsor Our Country Deserves Better is a Republican PAC that also operates the Tea Party Express, a bus tour arriving in DC for the 9/12 march. Our Country Deserves Better/Tea Party Express, which has ran an advertisement comparing Obama to Hitler, is managed by the GOP consulting firm Russo, Marsh & Rogers.

– Bronze Sponsors The Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute are phony think-tanks dedicated to churning out academic-appearing reports to discredit global warming. Like FreedomWorks, both organizations are funded by David and Charles Koch of the Koch Industries oil empire, one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

– Bronze Sponsor American Conservative Union is run by David Keene, a lobbyist for a firm that represents private health care companies, including the insurer HealthFirst.

– Bronze Sponsor The Senate Conservatives Fund is a Republican Party PAC run by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).

-Etc.

But almost everybody will be made dead rather efficiently, so the FEMA camps won’t cost much to the taxpayers.

God Bless America, we used to love you, but it’s time we left, say Texans on the March.

No need for this flag, anymore:

Bring back the (white) people flag and nation they lost last time:

Mmmmmmm, burning flesh and ovens has everything to do with socialism, I guess. Oh, wait, that was fascism, but never mind:

They are very confused about what is left symbolism and what is right symbolism.

Racist? Who? Me?

Not a threat, a promise

The Dark Fringe of the Republican Party on the road to Washington DC:

However many of them were there, that’s who these people are. And if FreedomWorks can organize 60-70,000 of them to come to the black heart of the evil United States of America, as dismaying a thought as it is, that’s pretty impressive, and nothing to lie about.

Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight sums the deception up well: Kibbe “did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.”

But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration — it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

Malkin, who to her credit later corrected the error, frets that it might be used to by liberals to “discredit the undeniably massive turnout”. She’s right to be worried — it absolutely will be used that way. If you don’t want to be discredited, then don’t, as Kibbe did, tell a ridiculous (and easily disprovable) lie.

Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it — the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present — and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirely of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening.

But there are no accounts of any of those sorts of things happening yesterday. 70 thousand people, rather, is about the number that will attend the Washington Redskins’ home opener next week. That’s a lot of people. Washington — actually Landover, Maryland, where FedEx Field is located — will be inconvenienced. But it won’t be shut down. Business will go on more or less as usual.