Desperately Seeking Validation From Those They Claim To Despise

This post from Thers was absolutely hilarious to me until I got to the end and saw that conservatives were yet again making the ridiculous claim that at their gatherings and protests, no trash is left on the ground, unlike those dirty liberals who can create trash out of thin air to leave strewn all over America's glorious landmarks.

And that's just very sad.  I don't understand why the teabaggers find it so necessary to inflate their crowd to such ludicrous levels.  How, well, dumb do you have to be to think that people will actually believe you got two million people on the National Mall the weekend after Labor Day?  And how desperate for validation do you have to be in order to convince yourself that such numbers are real?  It's as if the Teabaggers are a bunch of Napoleon Dynamites, talking about killing wolverines with their uncle and how they have a supermodel girlfriend in Oklahoma.

What really makes it pathetic, though, is how they actually believe - or at least want everyone else to believe - that they are so pure, so holy and righteous that they don't even generate trash.  That two million people could spend all day in one place and leave it as spotlessly clean - no, more so - as they found it.

Human beings are dirty.  They create trash and then litter it around.  Archaeology as a discipline exists only because of this part of the human character.  While I would like us to spread less trash, and less trash that poisons the planet, I for one would not criticize the Teabaggers just because they left a mess on the National Mall.  If they managed to not deface and/or destroy anything that's good enough for me.  I've got plenty else to criticize them for. 

Oliver Willis has some good pictures of the event here, Matt Yglesias has a few here.  Matt also brings up the point that

your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment.

Protests are never only about what they're about.  On the left there's always going to be the "Free Mumia" signs and other assorted topics that have nothing to do with the protest's declared purpose.  But I'll take the "Free Mumia" folks over a bunch of Confederacy-venerating, gun-fetishizing, woman-hating (and that includes women), warmongering, authoritarian freaks any day.

Comments

[oddjob]

I went down to the protest on the mall today just to have a look. The crowd was actually pretty impressive. I didn't have a good vantage point of the whole crowd, but I would say there were easily tens of thousands, maybe upwards of 50 thousand. But I was amused to hear more than one person really inflate those numbers. I overheard a guy on his cell phone saying there were two million people there, and another woman say a million and a half.

I worked for the Inaugural Committee this year, where a crowd that was more likely around 2 million gathered. I was on the mall and looked down it from the Capitol steps. It was a sea of people as far as the eye could see. Anyone who was there would be able to give their own personal story of the incredible logistical nightmare caused by the presence of two million people.No such city-wide chaos ensued today. You get my point.

I was prompted to photoshop this Inauguration Day photo. I hope you will post it for me. My job makes me have to be anonymous about it.

[John]

This sure looks like trash on the ground.

[litbrit]

David (TRex) shared this with me: Look at This Fucking Teabagger.

And if pictures of morans carrying moranic signs decrying our Fascist, Communist, Muslin, Kenyan, babykilling, grandmother-snuffing leader are too depressing for you and you'd rather just have a laugh at scary people minus the mind-numbingly stupid signs, go to People of Walmart.

[Nelson]

If somehow or another, two million extra people were in the district, I would have noticed. Traffic is always terrible around here, but, as a metric, traffic this weekend was no worse than it ever is. Hell, the 95 was running almost smoothly. If there was no trash generated its only because there were so few people present. Taking such losers at their words about anything is a fool's errand.

[oddjob]

...The tens of thousands of protesters marched to the U.S. Capitol chanting various slogans and waving posters that voiced a rather broad array of grievances against big government and the leaders, particularly President Obama, who the protesters blame for its size and scope....

- FoxNews article on the protest

[oddjob]

CNN: There Is A "Dark Fringe" To These Tea Party Events

Hat tip, Wicked Gay Blog

[kathy a.]

holy. crap.