When irony came to town

The teabaggers (their nickname for themselves still makes me snicker like an adolescent) descended on Washington, DC for yet another of their anti-government protests. They seem to hold them every other day or so, perhaps rather than working for a living (at least that way they wouldn’t have to pay the taxes they hate so much).

One of the leading wingnut websites declared that ABC News reported two million people were at the protest. In fact, they’d actually reported 40-70,000 (and veteran journalist David Schuster of MSNBC reported that, based on his 20 years of covering protests in DC, there were—at the very most—50,000 people). Did the wingnuts not realise that claims like that can be checked and, once it’s found to be blatantly untrue, they’d look, well, like they have a truth problem?

At the event, irony was thick. As Oznick wrote on The Daily Kos:

“After using Publicly Funded Transportation and Publicly Funded Roads to get to the Publicly Funded sidewalks to walk to the Publicly Funded Parks, at the end of their protest, what did these haters of Government Interference do?

“They threw their rubbish down for the Publicly Funded garbagemen & women of Washington DC to take care of. Carrying home all those thin sheets of Cardboard was obviously the task of someone with a larger work ethic.”

Ouch! Photos accompanying the post document what these self-anointed “patriots” left behind, but one photo was especially funny: It showed an American flag dumped onto a rubbish heap—in direct and clear violation of US Code Title 4, Section 8, which governs how flags no longer suitable for display are to be disposed of. Yeah… patriots… right…

The folks on the far right are great at creating irony. Too bad they’re not bright enough to see it or understand what that means.


Update 15/09/09: The wingnuts have been circulating a photo to “prove” how many teabag protestors were supposedly on the Mall in Washington, DC. One slight problem: The photo is over five years old. The Huffington Post reports on the scam, and how some wingnut sites have corrected their claims, while others seem obsessed with claiming it started as a “leftwing conspiracy” (I wonder what colour the sky is on their planet…). The post also names the origin of the false claim that ABC News “estimated a crowd of 1 to 1.5 million”: The same lobbying company that’s been organising these astroturf protests for months.