Thousands of protestors gathered over the weekend in Washington, D.C., to protest the Obama Administration’s policies. However, controversy over the number of protestors attending the rally ensued after several exaggerated estimates were perpetuated either negligently or purposefully by Michelle Malkin, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, and careless Twitters. From David Weigel at The Washington Independent (emphasis added):

So, how many people showed up at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington? One signal of the confusion over crowd counts came from the stage. Speakers alternately thanked a crowd that numbered in the “tens of thousands” and the “hundreds of thousands.” The source of that confusion, however, seemed to come from Twitter. The plugged-in Tea Party protesters who watched their progress on the insta-blogging service found anonymous and semi-anonymous people claiming that their numbers were nearing 2 million. At one point, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks got on stage and told the crowds that ABC News was reporting those high numbers.

Kibbe has walked that number back, crediting the mistake to misinformation on Twitter, and that leaves ABC’s estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters as the one that most media are using. Some conservatives are arguing for a bigger number; Robert Stacy McCain, in a post linked by Michelle Malkin, argues that “a people-meter at the intersection of Constitution Avenue and 11th Street” counted 450,000 people, and that some people made it late to the event due to traffic problems, so the media is undercounting it.

This dispute won’t end soon, as any veterans of anti-war protests could tell conservatives; it’s tough to get accurate crowd counts and tough to believe that something that felt massive was not, in fact, historically large. This was the largest march on Washington by conservatives in anyone’s memory. But Washington was home to one of the largest public gatherings of the decade just nine months ago, when 1.8 million people filled the mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial for President Obama’s inauguration, and that has given future protesters a barometer for their success. The reports of “2 million people” on the mall this weekend were always ludicrous.

More on the numbers game from the net:

1. ABC News: ABC News Was Misquoted on Crowd Size: ABC News Reported D.C. Rally Size in Tens of Thousands, Not 1M to 1.5M as Activist Said
2. CBS News: D.C. Tea Party Size Turns Into Misquote City
3. AMERICAblog News: Teabaggers claiming, erroneously, that they had 1.5m protesters yesterday – ABC says it’s a lie, it was tens of thousands
4. Daily Kos: ABC calls teabaggers out on crowd size attribution
5. Nate Silver: Size Matters; So Do Lies

However, dissent to the dissent of meaningful healthcare reform was in attendance at the 9/12 rally. During the protest, a lone supporter of the public option marched through an uproarious and unsupportive crowd of teabaggers at the “National Mall in Washington, DC, with a large sign that reads ‘Public Option Now.’”

More on the public option from Paul Krugman:

Most arguments against the public option are based either on deliberate misrepresentation of what that option would mean, or on remarkably thorough misunderstanding of the concept, which persists to a frustrating degree: I was really surprised to see Joe Klein worrying about the creation of a system in which doctors work directly for the government, British-style, when that has nothing whatsoever to do with the public option as proposed. (Forty years of Medicare haven’t turned the US into that kind of system — why would having a public plan change that?)

.       .       .

Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

In arguing against healthcare reform or government spending, the taxpayer and big government memes are frequently parroted and not thoroughly challenged by the media.

I’m a liberal, because I want to know the truth. To do this, I’m open-minded, and I do my best to consider issues objectively and from all viewpoints. However, the views of these 9/12 Project attendees clearly ignores reality, and it turns a blind eye to facts, so it ignores the truth. For example, the irony in the image below is so blatant that I wonder if these people suffer from a radical loss of touch with reality. Undoubtedly, special interests are counting on the gullibility of these people in order to keep the broken status quo in place.

Furthermore, these folks fail to understand that the federal government’s role is to keep its citizens happy and set prudent policy to solve some of our country’s biggest problems. A small or insignificant federal government will fail miserably, because the states failed miserably under the Articles of Confederation. The states could never replicate the consistency or cohesion that the federal government provides.

—
Photo source for attribution here, here, and here. The authors or licensors of these images do not endorse my work or me and their images are protected under an attribution license.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::