By Steve Hynd
Here's the Columbia Journalism Review's definitive takedown of wingnut hyperinflation of the D.C. Teabaggers demo. It was 60,000 according to the Washington, D.C., fire department, the only official body to do a count. Two million was, as Monty Python would say, right out. Nate Silver writes:
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 [in her update to her 9/12 tea party post]. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.
And here's a wingnut who can't quite get that 60,000 people will always leave a lot less mess than 1 million, no matter their politics.
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