Teabaggers Lie (as if that is news)

Skippy posted this over on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo today:

teabaggers: 2 million! us: you lie!

media matters, via steve benen, traces how confusion became a lie, and a lie became their story (and they're sticking to it!):

several conservative blogs have been quoting national park service spokesman "dan bana" as saying the 9/12 protest was "the largest event held in washington, d.c., ever." this appears to be a repurposing of this quote from david barna (who, unlike dan bana, appears to be a real person):

david barna, a park service spokesman, said the agency did not conduct its own count. instead, it will use a washington post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the us capitol grounds, national mall, and parade route.

"it is a record," barna said. "we believe it is the largest event held in washington, d.c., ever."

very impressive! unfortunately, as little green footballs pointed out, that quote was actually about the inauguration:

this is so pathetic i don't know whether to laugh or cry.

dozens - if not hundreds - of right wing blogs are running with this quote, portraying it as a statement about the tea party held last weekend: 'we believe it is the largest event held in washington, d.c., ever.'

the quote is from january. the national park service spokesman was talking about barack obama's inauguration

...imaginary abc news reports, unnamed universities, invented quotes, and for safe keeping, the journalistic equivalent of "i heard this one dude say."

from pam geller:

here's the video over at cspan of millions on the mall. incredible. look at the pan of the crowd shot. the left fascists are debating the number to take the focus off what happened in washington, d.c., this weekend. i'll go with the parks department estimates, thankyouverymuch.

a 9-12 participant in dc claims to have overheard dc police discussing the crowd numbers. they put the numbers at over 2 million -- and those were only the people who could make it into the city. the local authorities as well as many participants claim that many many more could not even get into the city to the core of the protest.

yes, she cited someone who "claims to have overheard dc police discussing the crowd numbers." your conservative blogosphere, ladies and gentleman.

add this to the propensity this weekend of the hardly-ever-right to claim a pic of the promise keeper's march in the 90's as their own tea-bagging. tampabay.com:

pete piringer, public affairs officer for the d.c. fire and emergency department, said the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. but the day of the rally, piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.

"it was in no way an official estimate," he said.

we asked piringer whether there were enough protesters to fill the national mall, as depicted in the photograph.

"it was an impressive crowd," he said. but after marching down pennsylvania avenue to the capitol, the crowd "only filled the capitol grounds, maybe up to third street," he said.

yet the widely posted photograph showed the crowd sprawling all the way to the washington monument, which is bordered by 15th and 17th streets.

there's another problem with the photograph: it doesn't include the national museum of the american indian, a building at the corner of fourth street and independence avenue that opened on sept. 14, 2004. (looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the national mall, next to the air and space museum.) that means the picture was taken before the museum opened five years ago. so clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the sept. 12 protest.

also worth noting are the cranes in front of the smithsonian museum of natural history. according to randall kremer, the museum's director of public affairs, "the last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the imax theater was being built."

it appears that the photo was actually taken in 1997 at a rally for promise keepers, a group for christian men. according to the group's web site, nearly 1 million people attended the event. photos of the oct. 4, 1997, event that were posted on various web sites in 2003, 2008 and earlier this year show either the same picture or a similar photo that has identical tents and what appear to be tv screens in the same locations.

conservative bloggers who originally posted the picture have backed down.

you can see a pattern emerging: the same ol' "if we say it's true, it is, because we say it's true."

*****

To put what really occurred number-wise we can go back to this Carolina Naturally post posted yesterday:

So Glenn Beck's hate rally produced about 60,000 fuckheads to march on Washington.
Sounds like a lot?
Well, on Saturday, Sept. 5, Alabama and Va Tech sold out Atlanta's Georgia Dome to the tune of 71, 500 fans.
So this outpouring of Beck's special brand of douchebaggery produced less interest on a national scale than a college football game played in Georgia.

~ Mark in Morehead City, NC

Damn, living in their fantasy world has to be hard.