From the blog of FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe:NBC estimated “hundreds of thousands.” What I know for sure is that there were at least hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators that descended upon Freedom Plaza, jammed Pennsylvania Avenue from there to the Capitol for over 3 hours, swamped the West Front of the Capitol, and flooded down the Mall and various side streets.Except the NBC article he links to doesn't say "hundreds of thousands." It says "tens of thousands."
As Nate Silver details at FiveThirtyEight.com, the repeated lies only hurt the people Kibbe claims to represent:
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.Teabaggers wonder why no one will take them seriously. Why should we? Rank-and-file teabaggers design their signs to deliberately offend. Their leader seems to be a pathological liar. Do they think that's how to earn respect?
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.
