Glenn Beck Tomfoolery an Unmitigated Disaster

Conservatives are doing their darndest to pump up the numbers for the unimitigated failure of Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project march on Washington yesterday...Prior to the event, House Republicans were estimating that there would be nearly two million attendees.

Regrettably, generous estimates top out at around 70,000. Seventy thousand is about THREE PERCENT of what they had anticipated. Even with free advertising by FOX News for the last few weeks, being able to muster just three percent of your expectations cannot be considered a success.

Still, the facts didn't get in the way of folks like Michelle Malkin and FreedomWorks from heaping praise on the "success" of the rally and claiming that there were two million people there, and attributing that claim to ABC News which they immediately denied.

To illustrate the difference between the ACTUAL attendance (70,000) and what Malkin, FreedomWorks and other fools claim (2,000,000), someone created this beautiful little visual. Definitely worth a click, and serves as a very effective demonstration of what happens when a political party rejects science, fact and logic.

Nate Silver has more:

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.