Does size matter?

Evidently it does when you talking about douche teabaggers: 

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.

Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it — the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present — and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirely of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening.

But there are no accounts of any of those sorts of things happening yesterday. 70 thousand people, rather, is about the number that will attend the Washington Redskins’ home opener next week. That’s a lot of people. Washington — actually Landover, Maryland, where FedEx Field is located — will be inconvenienced. But it won’t be shut down. Business will go on more or less as usual.

This was not a small rally. It was also not, in comparison with something like the 2006 pro-immigration protests, a particularly large rally. It was a business-as-usual sort of rally. Mock the protesters at your peril: business as usual suddenly isn’t so good for Democrats these days, and the sentiments of the 70,000 people who marched on Washington surely mirror those of millions more sitting at home. They were done a disservice by being represented by a liar like Kibbe.

I still have no use for tea baggery-but 70,000 people showing up in DC, despite Freedom Works attempts to inflate their impact, is still a lot and something the Congress in particular needs to be concerned about. But don’t call it a "movement".  I’d also point out that people who think this is about race-like Maureen Dowd-are kidding themselves and setting themselves up for failure next year. This is has nothing to do with race. The fact that Obama is black, gives the nuts in tea bag land something unique to grab onto, but don’t kid yourself. It could be Hillary Clinton in office and the same thing would have happened.

Tea baggery is about the idea that Republicans are entitled to be in the Presidency and any non Republican who occupies the oval office is a usuper-not entitled to be there.  By that line of thinking, the last "legitimate" Democratic President was Lyndon Johnson. Carter, Clinton, and now Barak Obama-are all pretenders to the throne-only present by some colossal deception of the American people. Its vehemence has been accelerated by talk radio and advent of one sided TV hosts who masquerade as journalists. Oh sure, the technique is not unique to the tea bagger’s side-its just that they have raised the ability to drive home a specific message to a high art form. "Anyone who disagrees with them is not just wrong-they are evil". The current parade of communist symbols and Hitlerite mustaches is just the end result of 19 years of conditioning. Only republicans-and only very  conservative Republicans have what it takes to govern America.

Now to be honest-this meme has been helped along the way by none other than the Democrats themselves-with their unique capability for self flagellation and boneheaded antics when close to achieving a goal. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the biggest threat to Obama-not this group of hot heads. As Larry Wilkerson pointed out :"But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven’t got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle."

So we are left with the message of the day from the tea baggers. Actually, its a lot of messages, cause they can’t seem to focus on just one. All they know, deep down, is that they don’t like the President. It gets easier when you have a President who ran on a mantra of change. That allows them to throw around words like "czars", "socialism", "facisim" and "communism" without any regard for the facts. Especially the fact that in actuality very little has changed-save for the fact that the very actions they decry as "socialist"-has allowed the market and the value of their 401K’s to rebound considerably since last year. Industrial production is now rising; so, probably, is real GDP. Poorly designed or no-the stimulus did that, they ignore what the alternative would have been. Its probably news to a lot of them that they actually lost ground economically during the past eight years. Don’t tell them that though-most of them believe that but for one or two bad breaks-they too could be obscenely rich like the insurance company CEO’s they are defending.

 I’m with Andrew Sullivan-the tea baggers might have a lot more credibility on the fear of government spending if they would be upset about all the spending that got us into this mess:

Here’s a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents. In so far as they can pressure the Congress and president into taking the debt seriously in the future, good for them. In so far as they are proposing no practical solutions, and echo truly disturbing hatred of a president barely eight months in office, facing huge crises on all fronts, they are doing their own cause far more harm than good.

But don’t fool yourself-all this saying "its about the President being black" is nonsense- that obscures how really dangerous these people could become. Its not about race-and just knowing that the facts are able to prove you right, won’t be enough as the year drags on. Tea Baggers only want to hear from people who believe their narrative. This is about a desire for a certain order-and order that says only one party has any ideas or ability to be in the White House. As ridicule worthy as these people are-they are not going away.

But they are not monolithic either. Its important to remember that elections are about 10 to 15 million people in the middle. They are not about the far right or the far left. Putting Palin on the ballot probably was the biggest thing McCain did to turn off those middle of the road voters. That’s why McCain is not President. Now its Obama’s turn to turn them off. From the looks of it, he’s off to a good start. But those 70,000 people not part of the group that’s in the middle. And they never will be.