Catapulting The Propaganda

The Wingers just aren't giving up on the Millions Of Invisible Teabaggers from last weekend, despite having any credibility on crowd size estimates smashed to flinders by pretending 60-70k was really two million people and using a photo of another rally from twelve years ago as "proof". Still, the newest barbaric yawp out of that side of the fence is yet another photo and some tortured math to arrive at just ten times the official estimate rather than 30 as Pajamas Media's Charlie Martin does some "detective work" to accompany a "panoramic photo" of the crowd.

What can we take away from this exercise? Here are the main points:

• The estimate widely used in the legacy media is not from an authoritative source, and it isn’t even consistent with itself: “full back to 3rd Street” is around 250,000 by Park Sevice methods, not a quarter of that.
• Many estimates, using different assumptions and different methods, arrived at numbers well into the hundreds of thousands.
• This is clearly consistent with the panoramic photo that we can source reliably.
• With everything above, and with several more estimates, I don’t think there is a plausible argument for any total attendance figure much less that 500,000 to 600,000. That is, nearly ten times the reported attendance.

How much does this matter? It’s hard to say. It might be that a precise number isn’t needed, and at any rate it may not be possible to get a good one. What we can say is that the number being reported is wildly wrong. Wildly too small.In any case, the number that will really matter is the count at the polls in 2010 and 2012. Given this, I’d say that any politicians who hope to retain their jobs better look very carefully at that panoramic photo — and remember.

I hope they do remember: How the Democrats actually won in 2006 and 2008, and why they won was because they opposed pathologically lying nutjob wackos like the ones screaming that Obama is the anti-Christ. The Democrats also won because they were elected on an agenda that voters want: health-care reform, environmental legislation, education reform and immigration reform. Democrats definitely need to look at that photo and remember the kind of people who will never vote for them anyway, and will never do anything other than scream at them, call them socialist traitors, and attack everything they try to do.

They need to remember that there's no reason to cave to them. Hang that photo on the wall, Dems. Every time you feel compelled to spinelessly urinate on yourselves because people like the ones represented in that photo call you names, remember you're doing the right thing, and the silent majority in this case will thank you for it.

[UPDATE 7:41 AM] And let's remember this photo came from Freedomworks, the same astroturf outfit that flat out lied about the crowd estimate last weekend. If there's any group involved in this that has no basis for any credibility whatsoever, it's Freedomworks.