Tea Party Crowd Size in DC Exaggerated

I really don’t understand the anger behind the Tea Party Protests; about 98percent of Americans who make less than $250,000 a year got a tax cut and people are somehow upset about this?  If they are anger about the swelling size of the national debt – projected by the White House at close to $9 trillion by 2011, well, $6 trillion of that debt was inheireted debt caused by Bush administration policies passed by the Republican Congress (yes, where were you then Congressman Campbell?).

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Photo courtesy of Crooks and Liars.com

Nate Silver of the popular website 538.com has this analysis on the exaggeration of the size of the DC Tea Party Protest.

From the post:

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.

remember-descent.jpg more tea bagger misspellings image by Tetani

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.

2 Comments

  1. I think the “Bury Obamacare” posters where a fake job printed up by liberals to make the Tea Party protesters appear looney.

    I don’t see any pictures of protesters holding up the signs – only the lame picture you show here of a person timidly displaying said poster.

    Link to a powerful speaker at the 912 March on DC:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7tPYAz8i3o

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