Nate Silver has a good post up talking about the extreme exaggeration about the teabigot crowd size from the right, an exaggeration that puts all disputes over the size of protests in the past to bed. In the past, conservatives have, at best, been able to accuse liberals of exaggerating crowd sizes to be two, maybe three times the size they are. But the number being pushed by conservatives—-and that was continuing to be emailed around and touted in comments sections after Michelle Malkin sheepishly corrected herself—-was 2.2 million protesters, when the reality is closer to 60,000. Like Nate said:
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.
The exaggeration of the crowd size tailors neatly the delusions and hysteria being pushed by the teabaggers. While it wasn’t 2.2 million people, it’s nonetheless tempting to suggest that never have so many yelled so loudly while knowing so little and believing so many lies. The teabaggers believe in death panels established to prioritize illegal immigrants over their white grandmothers, that schools will be installing abortion clinics in schools so they can perform abortions between classes, that the health care plan is actually a secret plan to get every Republican voter on record so they can put them in concentration camps. (You’d think voting booths would be more effective.) They’ve felt exactly zero need to attach themselves to reality in the past, so why would they be stopped by just making up physically impossible numbers for their protest? Hell, they should have said 5 million. There was a failure of imagination going on here.
One of the favorite myths being trotted out before the protesters had even cleared out was the myth that no trash was left behind. Stephen Suh was the only blogger that I saw that noted that this is actually something that wingnuts claim after every single wingnut gathering. They aren’t particularly original people, and certain myths get trotted out pretty much every time they get stimulated, as this thread—-which devolved into a lot of wingnuts praising the Confederacy and all but claiming that their brave Southern heroes didn’t own slaves—-demonstrates. I first heard the “conservative crowds didn’t leave a speck of litter” argument around 1994, when I heard Rush Limbaugh claim it about a gathering he had. I’m sure it’s much older than that. The funniest thing is that these ancient, creaky myths are trotted out every time as if they had just discovered their own purity and awesomeness. The myth, of course, is based on self-delusion and I’m sure a certain tautology. Wingnuts who saw trash on the ground a) ignored it or b) blamed it on someone else. Thers got a picture of the non-trash left by the pure and the righteous.