Teh Eagles Have Crash-Landed

So how many people were there, really, at the Gathering of Eagles demonstration? We don’t know, but here’s the final word on that ‘National Park Service’ figure of 30,000 pro-war demonstrators, now ubiquitous on the Web and in the right-leaning media.

Michelle Malkin wrote on Saturday that the figure came directly from the Gathering of Eagles:

***Update: Kit at Gathering of Eagles reports on the National Park Service estimate of the GoE turnout: 30,000 strong. The silent majority no more.***

Then at some point, the attribution changed:

***Update: Heidi at Gathering of Eagles reports on the National Park Service estimate of the GoE turnout: 30,000 strong. The silent majority no more.***

Here’s what the Gathering of Eagles site now says — that text, as well, has been changed* since Sunday evening, when it only read, ‘the first unofficial estimate’ (emphasis ours):

2) the first unofficial NPS estimate of the Eagle turn-out today:

30,000!

That figure may be adjusted upward as more figure are tallied during the week.

Now here’s what the National Park Service has to say about it:

Dear Mr. […]:

I am the spokesperson for the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. I never issued any statement of any kind about anything related to this past weekend’s events, let alone anything about crowd size. In fact, I was never asked that question by anyone.

Anyone who gives any crowd size number or figure for this past weekend is making the figure up and does not have any authorization whatsoever to attribute those figures to the National Park Service. Since I never issued any such statement nor was ever the question raised in the first place, it is impossible to attribute any figures to the National Park Service for this past weekend’s events.

Lastly, Congress prohibits the National Park Service from giving or providing any crowd estimate for any permitted event on the National Mall.

I hope this is of help and clarification for you.

Bill Line
Communications & Tourism Officer
National Park Service
National Capital Region
1100 Ohio Drive, SW
Washington, D.C. 20242

Looks like someone has some ‘splaining to do.

One more thing: Below is the attendance petition circulated widely on the Internet by the Gathering of Eagles organizers, in order to gauge the number of demonstrators:

To: All Interested Parties

We, the undersigned, pledge to attend the March 17th Gathering of Eagles in Washington, D.C. We intend to stand guard at our nation’s sacred memorials to honor the memory of our troops who died in service of our great country. We promise to recognize and reflect on the sacrifice of our fallen heroes.

Please sign here only IF you WILL be in attendance at the Vietnam War Memorial on March 17th. We are trying to obtain an accurate total so we know how many to expect. There is another petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/GOE317/petition.html – please sign there if you will be with us IN SPIRIT.

Our troops, current and prior, are true heroes and we will honor each and every one of them by standing side by side, heads held high, defending the sanctity of our nation’s monuments to veterans. Our sacred pledge is that our actions will honor those heroes and that we will respect their service and their sacrifice.

I WILL be at the Gathering of Eagles on March 17th in Washington, DC.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned


1826 Total Signatures

One would have to say that 1,826 doesn’t seem very close at all to the figure the right-wing noisemakers have been cheering about.

Then again, another petition for people who pledged to ‘be there in spirit’ has 4155 signatures, so maybe there was also a big pro-war demonstration in Second Life or something.


* The Gathering of Eagles site has changed again, and once again reads ‘the first unofficial estimate,’ leaving out the part about the National Park Service.

We were fooled for a second, thinking we’d made a mistake. But we’ve been copying and pasting that passage directly from their page each time, here and at FDL, and each time it says something different.

Rather than try to figure out what’s going on over there, with all the changing-things-back-and-forth, we’re content to advance an alternative hypothesis: If they never claimed such a thing, then Malkin must have invented the story about the National Park Service and falsely attributed it to a Kit, and then a Heidi, at Gathering of Eagles.

Perhaps they’d like to figure that out amongst themselves. Malkin doesn’t give in easily to being the one left holding the bag.

 

Comments: 91

 
 
 

Oh ‘National Park Service’. We thought you said National Snark Service. OK, we admit it, about 15 people showed up.

 
 

It takes some balls to make up an imaginary crowd of 30,000 people on the National Mall. I mean, that would seem to be a fairly easy claim to prove or disprove. Whether or not there were 30,000 demonstrators in the middle of the capital city should not be a point of contention.

 
 

There’s a thirteen year old girl who lives in our apartment building who tells her friends that she is “going out” with my son, and has made up stories about places they’ve gone together. My son (14) has had some problems with his actual girlfriend over this. I tell him to be patient with his poor little neighbor, because she really, really wishes it was true, and I feel sorry for her.

This is a lot like that. They really, really wish the popular kids would come to their pro-war party, but the cool kids are over at the much bigger party on the other side, and the poor eagles know no one really likes them anyway…

We should feel sorry for them, I guess.

 
 

bush just now explaining the three branches of govt. wow, just wow.

 
 

I missed the part where you proved the 30,000 number wrong. You simply proved that less than 2000 signed the online petition and that the park service didn’t say there was 30,000. You never actualy proved there was not 30,000.

This problem is the same as the left wing groups. They claim say 200,000 when in reality it was 20,000 if that. So far I have yet to see proof of either the left wings or the right wings claims.

 
a different brad
 

Sorry to be off topic, but wow.
I think i’m watching the beginning of the end. Bush is angry, and SCARED.
If even he understands how bad this is, then wow.
I’ve never, ever, ever been so happy to listen to George Bush speak.
He’s fucked.
Soooooooooooooooo fucked.

 
 

I missed the part where you proved the 30,000 number wrong. You simply proved that less than 2000 signed the online petition and that the park service didn’t say there was 30,000. You never actualy proved there was not 30,000.

As I said, we don’t know how many attended. However, we do know that the Gathering of Eagles organizers lied about having an attendance figure from the Park Service, and in fact never even spoke to the Park Service.

 
 

Candy,

Let’s hope her fantasies remain chaste — that situation could go downhill real fast, angry parents etc.

I don’t feel sorry for anyone who is still cheerleading Bush’s meatgrinder. There’s no excuse for it. Inability to move out of the past does not justify helping to trash the present. Paranoia and patriotism are not the same thing.

“Liberals were planning to deface the Vietnam Wall but we rallied 30,000 people to defend it and the media covered it up” — that is, simply, the ranting of a crazy person. Looney tunes. The Venn Diagram circles for that statement and reality are not even on the same page.

On to Tehran!

 
 

Our troops, current and prior, are true heroes…

Have I ever mentioned how much this FUCKing PISSes me OFF??

If you spend even a little time under fire, you will witness heroism. It will come from unexpected places, but you will see it. The rest of us? We were participants. We just showed up. Didn’t do jack diddlysquat that was heroic. In fact, most of us actively avoided doing anything that might even LOOK heroic, ’cause it’s a really good way to get terminal lead poisoning.

But this is as stupid as giving all the kids who show up for the game a ribbon or a plaque. It says heros are the same as goats. There is no bravery, there is no special, there just is a bunch of guys wearing the same clothes – they are all the same. To whatever extent you want to make military awards for heroism above and beyond utterly meaningless, you can just hang the “hero” label on anyone who got within, oh I dunno, let’s say 1000 klicks of hostilities.

Some men are heroes. Most are not. To fail to recognize the ones that are is to taint everybody, because if you can’t tell the difference you’ve only described the common denominator.

Which isn’t even to bother to mention, as I’ve said before, it really did take more courage to go to Canada, give up your entire future and perhaps family and friends, then it did to be a good american sheep and show up at the appointed spot to get your hair cut off and get sent to vietnam…

mikey

 
 

Man, that was close. I was thinking, during the march, about spitting on the
Vietnam War Memorial in spirit. Good thing I decided not to.

 
 

February 6, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Sadly, No! is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 5, 2007. Calling All Wingnuts embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Calling All Wingnuts is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 19, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Sadly, No! is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 20, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin.

 
 

The much-feared defacing of the Vietnam Memorial by wild elephants was narrowly averted, and the fact that not a single wild elephant sighting was reported demonstrates the glorious success of the warlusters’ march.

 
 

J— said,

March 21, 2007 at 0:05

February 6, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Sadly, No! is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 5, 2007. Calling All Wingnuts embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Calling All Wingnuts is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 19, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin. Sadly, No! is hit by denial-of-service attack.

March 20, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin.

ans id hit by a DDOS.

IHow odd.

 
 

Wait a minute. I thought the wingers didn’t even like the Vietnam Memorial:

Even before it was dedicated, the memorial wall was knocked by civilians and veterans. Some complained it wasn’t white like the other monuments. It is black, a color associated with evil and bad guys. Some noted it was shaped in a V like the peace sign. And many complained because it was designed by a woman of Asian descent. Weren’t there any “American” designers available?

Author Tom Wolfe took his shots, writing it was “positively skill proof … a giant pitiless tombstone … not even a flag.”

 
 

Excellent reporting, Gavin! I sure hope you have someone investigating the DoS attacks. You know, they’re kinda illegal, ya know?

 
 

Wait a minute. I thought the wingers didn’t even like the Vietnam Memorial…

You were expecting these guys to make sense? They don’t like it, or at least they didn’t, until now. They just hate liberals more.

 
 

People like the Eagles actually do scare me, and I don’t scare easily. (Maybe I just don’t have a lot of common sense.) They seem so pathological in their hatred. This intense loathing of Jane Fonda, for example, is not healthy. Fine, many decades ago a young woman filled with desire to stop an unjust conflict went about it in a foolish way, and has since apologized. But they work themselves up to spit frothing rage at the very sound of her name. This is just one example of the very scary rage they have.

These are the kind of people who attract the Eric Rudolphs and Tim McVeighs of the world, and get them all worked up. I heard that they attacked a protester who had a child in his arms, when the man accidentally wandered into their crowd.

CS Lewis Jr: She has already gotten a bit obsessive. I’m hoping that she’ll pick another boy soon.

 
 

Owned.

Good work Sadly,No! Nicely done.

These guys think bald-faced lies work because they *have* for years. The entire Bush administration is predicated on the belief that saying something enough times makes it true. We will be greeted as liberators, we’ll have troops out by 2006, Walter Reed scandal is a fake, Al Gore is a big liar, etc etc.

People are waking up.

If there were 30k people how about a single f*cking photograph showing anything close to that? Not gonna happen.

They are either liars or crazy – or both. Probably both.

 
 

maybe the organizers took their cue from ‘nam and handed out playing cards to everybody (it’s one way to get a body count).

 
 

By the power of Wiki.

 
Principal Blackman
 

The much-feared defacing of the Vietnam Memorial by wild elephants was narrowly averted, and the fact that not a single wild elephant sighting was reported demonstrates the glorious success of the warlusters’ march.

Lisa, I’d like to buy your rock!

 
 

Y’know, if you did as much crank as your average Rolling Thunder skag, you might start seeing double, triple, or tenfold too.

 
 

“But they work themselves up to spit frothing rage at the very sound of her name. This is just one example of the very scary rage they have.”

Hopefully they’ll get so worked up that they expend some of that rage against themselves a la ‘Nacht der langen Messer’.

 
 

I said this yesterday, but I like repeating myself.

Why, oh why would Michelle Malkin claim 30,000 attended her “defense of a memorial not in any danger” after putting up video on Hot Air of said event that in no way shows that there were anywhere near that many people in attendance?

Why??? God, she makes me crazy.

 
 

Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

 
 

> The much-feared defacing of the Vietnam Memorial by wild elephants was narrowly averted, and the fact that not a single wild elephant sighting was reported demonstrates the glorious success of the warlusters’ march.

The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.

 
 

Why, oh why would Michelle Malkin claim 30,000 attended her “defense of a memorial not in any danger� after putting up video on Hot Air of said event that in no way shows that there were anywhere near that many people in attendance?

Why not? If she can successfully convince people that the distinction between “destroyed” and “damaged” mosques is evidence of a grand left-wing MSM conspiracy, then she can do just about anything. We all saw how she fucked up the Jamilgate thing, yet none of the rightwingers looked closely enough to see that the description “destroyed” couldn’t even be attributed to Jamil. That’s what happens when you’ve already reached your conclusion before the evidence. By the holy Law of Fives, the evidence will organise itself to suit your conclusion.

 
 

The most hilarious part of this is that Malkin doesn’t have the self-control to simply pass off this made-up number and let it lie. That’d be just too easy. No, she actually goes out of her way to shove a finger into the eye of the NYT (“THEY LIE!” she shrieks), who had the temerity to gauge the size of the protest at “several hundred.” Quoth Malkin:

“Pure bullcrap. Yup, the journalistic standard-bearers of the NYTimes relied on ‘several veterans of the antiwar movement’ to give them crowd estimates of the Gathering of Eagles. It’s the domestic equivalent of MSMers relying on dubious Iraqi stringers to provide them with war coverage while they sit in their comfy Green Zone offices in D.C. and Manhattan.”

Touche! Still, one can’t help but point out that this is a better method of fact-gathering than using the internet to disappear an Iraqi police captain.

 
 

The most hilarious part of this is that Malkin doesn’t have the self-control to simply pass off this made-up number and let it lie… No, she actually goes out of her way to shove a finger into the eye of the NYT (â€?THEY LIE!â€? she shrieks)

Yes, and again, it worked last time: If you get it wrong, just up the ante. She even references “dubious Iraqi stringers” without fear, in which she did exactly the same thing[1]. She does it because it works.

It’s strange to watch. In my line of work, people treat you with suspicion when you never admit uncertainty or error, and when you start getting louder. But it seems in the real world, it works the other way. It makes me think that this is our natural state, and the only way to overcome it is by long and difficult training.

[1] When Jamil was found, and when she was forced to confront evidence that that the mosques were indeed attacked as reported, she didn’t admit her errors. Instead, she made a tenuous connection between an early, later-corrected, unattributed report of a “destroyed” mosque, attributed it to Jamil, and simply became more shrill.

 
 

of course they can’t get 30,000 people to get up off their asses and go to d.c.

those people might run into a military recruiter while they are there.

 
 

hey you denier of service here reading about the lies propagated by your leaders (michelle malkin et al): you are weak and pathetic. you piss yourself on a regular basis whenever a real man or woman even looks at you. your shame at your weakness leads to a desire to strike out at others. given your physical fear, the only thing you can think to do is use the internet to deny others the right to express themselves.

well, you are still losers. you always were and you always will be. and i look forward to any revolution i must fight in inside MY country where you are the enemy, because the fight will be short and crushing for you.

 
 

hey you denier of service here reading about the lies propagated by your leaders (michelle malkin et al)…

What’s the bet that when I return later this afternoon, SadlyNo will be replaced with a flashing headline “j00 833n H4xx023|)!!” and a massive goatse image (don’t Google that)? Totally nothing to do with Gathering of Eagles or Malkin or any such thing.

Although it’s interesting to note that Crooks and Liars is down too. “137 phr33|)0m 2319n”?

 
Incontinentia Buttocks
 

Who was the left-blogosphere denizen who attended Oberlin with Ms. Malkin and was standing up for her basic decency and intelligence a few weeks ago?

I’m sorry. She’s a hysterical (in both senses of the word) liar. There’s nothing decent or intelligent about her.

 
Galactic Dustbin
 

This intense loathing of Jane Fonda, for example, is not healthy. Fine, many decades ago a young woman filled with desire to stop an unjust conflict went about it in a foolish way, and has since apologized. But they work themselves up to spit frothing rage at the very sound of her name.

actually my Dad, FAR from a wingnut, the guy who taught me to be a Democrat; but also in the Navy during Vietnam and he HATES Fonda as well. To a whole generation of Service Men, Red and Blue, find her apology- far too little, far too late.

Having said that, to keep bringing her name up since she has pretty much been a non-enty for decades, is like telling Micheal Moore fat jokes, or Clenus jokes- a lack of imagination.

 
 

Needs more Great Gazoogle.

I take full credit for calling them out on this. No amount of facts, data, or proof will sway me from this position of being the Caller Outer, Esquire.

 
 

That letter from the Park Service is priceless.

“I hope this is of help and clarification for you.”

So cold. So sharp.

 
 

You never actualy proved there was not 30,000.

Hell, we never proved tthere was not 30,001. Or 29,999. Or that they weren’t all wearing pink stocking caps.

Fucking idiot. This is a product of home-schooling clearly.

Someone pulls a number out of his ass, attributes it to a source that denies it, and you still stand by it because no one has actually “proved” that it wasn’t there.

Hell, I could say the National Park Service says that sonofdy is a pud-pulling mewling pimplefaced wanker. Contact the National Park Service to confirm, but even if they deny it you still have to prove you’re not a pud-pulling mewling pimplefaced wanker.

 
 

the other thing I really don’t understand is the young right wing — and I know it’s young people, it’s certainly people under 50 — who keep using the “Dirty Fucking Hippie” as their pet bugaboo.

These people weren’t born when Hippies walked the Earth. They haven’t ever seen a Hippie!

It’s like me calling somebody a Flapper — I wasn’t alive to see them, so how would I know?

 
 

Has anyone seen a documentary on eagles??? Not the nicest of birds. Even using the low estimate of crowd size, that would be a lot of chickenshit, er I mean eagleshit to clean up.

 
 

There are several problems with your analysis of how many signed the petition to attend.

1. Not everyone knew about the petition so didn’t sign. Probably a very large number.

2. Some groups had only one person sign to represent the group. Many of those included the actual number in the comments.

Looking at the raw number of signatures is inconclusive but should be taken as the base minimum of attendance.

I was there and I can say that the Eagles easily outnumbered the protesters by a factor of two or three to one.

 
 

You never actualy proved there was not 30,000.

Fucking idiot. This is a product of home-schooling clearly.

Teaching homeschool kiddies about how the burden of proof works would be … counterproductive.

 
 

I was there and I can say that the Eagles easily outnumbered the protesters by a factor of two or three to one.

Were you also there when the National Parks Service provided the estimate to Gathering of Eagles?

 
 

Not everyone knew about the petition so didn’t sign. Probably a very large number.

Conversely there might be some people who didn’t attend, but signed the petition anyway. Probably a very large number cheeto eating basement dwellers with the intelligence of fruit bats.

 
Random Observer
 

There were actually 666,666 Eagles at the rally. Hey, prove me wrong!

That’s how it works right? I say something that doesn’t make any sense, provide no documentation, attribute info falsely, but the burden is on you to prove me wrong. Right?

Also the moon is a giant eggo waffle. Prove me wrong!

The fact is, there is no reason to believe there were 30k people there. How about a *single* photograph? Is it really that hard?

What we *have* seen is press reports the estimate much lower along with clear falsehoods about “official” estimates that were never actually provided.

I’ll go out on a limb and say when the only evidence you present is obviously false you are probably making shit up.

 
Random Observer
 

By the way I was there and I saw only 3 people total. But I did see over a thousand blackbirds – ominous!

I have photos as well but they are offline.

 
 

It’s been a long, long time since anything on the internet actually made me laugh out loud.

“1826 Total Signatures” made me laugh out loud. Not a little chuckle, but a full on belly laugh.

Thanks for that!

 
 

Looking at the raw number of signatures is inconclusive but should be taken as the base minimum of attendance.

Nonsense, sonny.

Listen, I work in the event management business. I’ve been estimating attendance figures as part of my job for over 20 years.

There are basic rules of thumb about attendance attrition for FREE EVENTS that are pretty consistent whether you’re talking about a political rally, a free concert, or a cocktail reception.

You lose about 30% of the bodies that are recorded in whatever devices one uses to predict in advance the attendance.

Any RSVP list will be in actuallity short by between 40 and 20%. If you give away 1000 free tickets to a show, you’re going to get about 600 people in the audience. If you throw a party, about 30% of the people who said they’d come won’t.

I’m not saying anything about the number of people who attended the rally. But what I am saying is that if 1826 people said they’d come, about 30% of them didn’t.

See – it’s a free event. People didn’t buy a ticket for it. They haven’t made a committment. If your major marketing tool to publicize the event has a device that tries to collect attendance figures in advance, this is pretty much how it works across the board.

Maybe people came who didn’t sign the petition. I don’t really know. But believing that everyone who signed the petition showed up flies in the face of my experience as an event planner.

Even if people came who didn’t sign the petition, there is nothing in my experience as an event planner that would indicate that the number would be 15,000 times MORE than the number who had enough of an interest to sign the petition. Typically, the number of “walk-ups” is usually about 1/2 of the number of people who stated they WOULD attend but don’t.

BTW — 30,000 people fills a major football stadium or arena. That’s a pretty big crowd to accommodate, including parking their cars and providing enough portapotties for them. 1800 – or 1200 – is still a pretty impressive looking crowd if you see them enmasse, and if you’re not used to estimating crowd size, you might easily think it was a higher number.

 
 

I was there and I I have been to numerous protests over the years ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands (RNC in NYC, 2004) and have gotten quite good at estimating crowd sizes.

Wrigley Field holds 41,000 people maximum (ie, sold out play off games). I did not see anything that came anywhere NEAR (not even in a magnitude of 10), a sold out major league baseball stadium’s worth of Beagles gathering.

This picture shows ~1,000 people. I did NOT see 30 times this amount, nor has any picture I have seen shown anything even remotely close to 30 times this amount.

http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/news/img/feb05/aurora021505.jpg

Think of one of your favorite concert halls and then look up its capacity. You’ll see that places that seem quite huge actually have much smaller capacity than you think.

for those of you who know NYC, Bowery Ballroom has a max capacity of 550, shown below:

http://www.wearescientists.com/_a/i/crowdshots/med/NYBowery0510.jpg

Someone can paste SIXTY of these together and see what 30,000 people looks like. Show me a picture that looks like SIXTY of the above shot and then I’ll believe you.

 
 

I think maybe these people just don’t understand how numbers work, that they actually signify a specific amount of something. There was a guy pictured on Malkin’s site who claimed to have ridden his bike 1500 miles from Tennessee. Seeing a Memphis, in far western Tennessee is only about half that distance from DC I suspect he is, how do you say, full of the shit.

 
 

Does anyone else see the irony of a rightwing movement named after the classic movie starring a homosexual whose tragic death by AIDS single-handedly brought AIDS awareness to new peaks in America, thus highlighting Reagan’s completely disgusting dismisal of the epidemic running rampant in our country during his tenure as President?

http://ca.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/5/b70-2950

 
 

Say, it’s yet ANOTHER story featuring the Malted on Sadno … Could it be, possibly …

“A pretty girl … is like a melody …”.

 
 

Hi, Lawrence.

You are right, your first picture shows about 1000. Although I might say it shows about 1000 SEATS, there are quite a few empty seats. So maybe there are about 850 or 900 actual bodies in the picture.

Thanks for the visual aids.

FYI – during Katrina, 10,000 people were estimated to have spent the night at the Superdome. Here’s a picture of people at the dome when they were finally evacuated:

http://www.iveknownrivers.org/read.php?id=144

This is obviously only a fraction of all the people who were there, but the picture looks formidable.

News reports estimated that approximately 42,000 people TOTAL were evacuated from the entire city of New Orleans by the Saturday a week after the hurricane hit.

Can you imagine what 30,000 people would look like?

FYI — I unknowingly got caught in the blow-out of the 2002 Bayou Classic football game while driving through the streets of New Orleans. The attendance that day was about 30,000, according to records. This is a ticketed event, where attendance figures are accurate. If 30,000 people really attended the Eagle thing, it would have made a significant impact on traffic and capacity in the area.

I dont live in DC, but somebody tell me — was there a significant impact on traffic during the rally time?

(crickets)

 
 

The current meme is that none of the photographs show 30,000 people, and indeed none of the people who attended saw 30,000, because the counterprotesters were spread throughout the mall at various locations making it hard to estimate. In other words: It’s untestable, QED. And let us never speak of that NPS attribution again.

Amusingly enough, even on FreeRepublic this 30,000 number is questioned by a few. For example,

“I was at the end of the Gathering of Eagles rally. The key organizer told me that it could run from 5-8,000 because people were scattered long Constitution Ave and elsewhere, besides being gathered at the main assigned site near 21st-22nd street. I would say, based on talking to friends who were there all the time, that the figure of 5,000 is pretty accurate …” Max Friedman.

If by several hundred they [NYTimes] mean 60-80 hundred, then they’re right. Hoodlum91.

Not that protest-organisers inflating numbers is anything to write home about.

Regardless of the exact number, both “sides” agree that the number of counterprotesters was unusually high. The implication of these SadlyNo posts is that people were misled and manipulated into coming by the phony threat to the war memorial, and perhaps so many wouldn’t have turned up without this campaign of misinformation. This was also echoed in some news articles. However, I haven’t seen any actual attendees say that this is how they felt about it? It’s hard to Google for. Has anyone actually come across an attendee saying this in retrospect?

 
 

great work, gavin. actually calling the nps was a stroke of genius.

hey…d’ya think the multi-millionaire media might learn from your example and start contacting sources to learn and report actual facts? that would be great! d’ya think?

naaaaawwwwwwhhhh…..

 
 

Have you ever looked at Archive.org Wayback Machine? It is kind of like Google Cache… you can go back and look at what a website used to say, by date, back as many as several years,

 
 

Has anyone actually come across an attendee saying this in retrospect?

I have. But this is a part of the story that I’ve wanted to be careful with. I think a lot of veterans groups signed up in good faith, and that it needs to be made clear that they were used as props in a pro-war, anti-‘liberal’ rally.

 
 

30,000 people – one of them had a camera, where’s the photogs?

 
Innocent Bystander
 

BTW — 30,000 people fills a major football stadium or arena. That’s a pretty big crowd to accommodate, including parking their cars and providing enough portapotties for them. 1800 – or 1200 –

That’s figuring a normal crowd. Historically, we’ve seen a 10-1 ratio of porta-potties to fleagles. So if they were planning on 30,000, they’d have had the world’s largest gathering of porta-potties.

 
 

March 20, 2007. Sadly, No! embarrasses Michelle Malkin.

Sadly, No!
Michelle Malkin can not be embarrassed, because that would indicate emotional sympathy as one of her character traits.

Clearly she lacks that capacity.

If she did have any amount of sympathy for others, her statements would reflect that concern or show tact and restraint.

The correct wording is as follows:
‘March 20, 2007 Michelle Malkin embarrasses Michell Malkin,
as chronicled by Sadly, No!’

 
 

Allright, there must be some smart person out there with access to satellite surveillance photos of the DC area at the time in contention. If someone can come up with those photos from space, or from the air, then it will be easy to prove. Assuming high resolution images, of course. On the other hand, anybody good with photoshop could tell a lie even with a photo. So maybe we cannot know. But there must be photos. 30,000 show up on a photo from the right angle. I doubt if there were 1000.

 
 

Gavin, if that’s on the web, you need to link to it. If you have someone who is willing to say something about it, you need to get them to talk. I think that’s the real story here, not the 30,000 or anything like that.

You’ve seen historically, like with Jamilgate, that those we’d like to reach are not very good at picking up subtleties and are easily distracted. What you’ve said above is an easy enough inference for most of us here, but it won’t be obvious to those with their ideological blinkers on, those who often don’t have the right kind of training for picking these things up.

 
Herr Doktor Bimler
 

I think maybe these people just don’t understand how numbers work, that they actually signify a specific amount of something.

That sometimes shows up as a symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome, or frontal lobe lesions.
/House

 
 

How many of you guys signed that pledge? I did sign it at least 5 times. 4 times from work computers and once at home.

 
 

I just read at the this GoE site;

“We were also supplemented by the Park Police and the Washington Metro Police”

I wonder what the coppers have to say?

 
 

I do like the every service man is a hero. So, I spent 3 years in the Navy chasing pussy, getting drunk and doing drugs. But I am still a hero. Yay for me!!!

 
 

CS Lewis Jr said, March 20, 2007 at 23:42
“It takes some balls to make up an imaginary crowd of 30,000 people on the National Mall.”

Yeah but very small balls by comparison…
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/5382.html

 
 

Perhaps you could try a “screen shot” program to archive the changing pages you are monitoring? I realize that photos can be edited but the exif data within the original should be sufficient to maintain data integrity when the chickenhawks begin squawking about lies and misrepresentation [lol].

Also saving the entire page as is, an option available in most browsers can also help in archiving what was actually said. There are also programs which warn of updated pages and reload immediately when changes are detected. This can be of use in gaging when changes were made. Helpful in showing a time line in your work.

Thank you for the space to comment and thank you again for your excellent reporting. If it weren’t for the independent blogs I doubt we’d be getting half as much REAL information about anything.

 
 

Excellent catch, S,N! guys!

And if I may be allowed to do a bit of blogwhoring for the wonderful World O Crap, ScottC actually has some photographic evidence of “The Gathering”:

http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=406

 
 

I was there on the Mall on Saturday – not participating in any protest, had no idea there were any going on. I was sightseeing with my girlfriend and her brother. I saw a couple of hundred Vietnam Vets with support the war signs, and a couple of hundred anti-war demonstrators. We went to the Vietnam Wall at about 2pm, it was my first time there, very moving of course. Nothing really unusual going on there, so it was a shock to see on the 5 o’clock local TV news this stuff about the “planned attack on the Wall” by the anti-war protestors and all the heavy security they’d had there earlier in the day. They showed some white lady there dressed in veterans garb talking about how the anti-Iraq War people were blaming the troops and taking it out on them when they come home. She must have been talking about Vietnam or smoking some crystal, I thought, because I know of NO ONE who blames the troops in that way, and of course no one is being nasty to the returning soldiers because NONE OF THEM ARE RETURNING — they just keep getting rotated back to keep the troop levels up, dig?

In other words, that 1800 number sounds right to me. 1800 Screaming Eagles or whatever they’re called — tops. And the whole thing was predicated on an obviously bullshit idea anyway. No one was EVER going to attack that Wall. For what reason? It’s a beautiful, powerful expression of the terrible price of war and the need to only go to war as an absolute last resort.

 
 

“You’ve seen historically, like with Jamilgate, that those we’d like to reach are not very good at picking up subtleties and are easily distracted.”

IOW, they’re fucking obtuse…welcome to Amurika.

 
 

RE: Edward S. said, – March 21, 2007 at 16:36

Man, you gotta think that the fact that the Right hasn’t been able to pin anything like that on the Left over the last 4 years is driving them absolutely NUTS.

This was an orchestrated attempt to get that talking point echoed in the MSM (and thus made real?). Sadly for them, they seem to have fucked that up like so much else these days.

 
 

http://www.sanbuy.com has pics. But it is so overloaded with images it takes forever to load, and may just crash your computer.

It looks like there were about 30 people there. And they seem to hate women a lot. And really, really hate Jane Fonda.

Wow.

 
 

More pics. But they seem to only be of war protesters.

30,000? Bullshit!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gatheringofeagles/

 
 

I was there, and 1,826 Eagles is totally plausible based on how many of them I saw, both in their gathering spot (which my GF dubbed “Flagland”) and in their meager attempt to line our marching route to the Pentagon (their single-file route-lining line only went barely a quarter of the way there, and the route wasn’t really that long, just over a bridge from the Mall and into a vacant lot next to the Pentagon).

30K? Simply impossible, unless they’re counting their fingers and toes and teeth as individual Eagles.

It didn’t look like we had 30K either, but we outnumbered the Eagles at least ten to one, and that’s being modest.

 
 

Oh, and I’d like to note that Michelle Malkin was NOWHERE in sight at the gathering….

 
 

These people are amazing.

There entire mode of “logic” is like a bad parody of that fantastic piece by Monty Python with the Black Knight versus Arthur.

“There were 30,000 people there.”

“No there weren’t.”

“Yes there were. That’s what the Park Service says.”

“But the Park Service never said such a thing.”

“Yes they did.”

“No they didn’t.”

“Ah, well, they’re a bunch of tree huggers anyway. It doesn’t matter. Look at our pictures. There are obviously 30, 000 people there.”

“Your pictures show maybe 3-400. Lots of them are pictures of the same people over and over.”

“No, these pictures obviously show 30,000 people.”

Etc., etc.

Start downloading the HotAir flickr photos of those “30,000” eagles now before they disappear down the memory hole.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39049221@N00/

 
 

Well, just as a small point of reference, I was out and about in the city on 3/17 doing my patriotic duty of drinking Guinness and hunting down fish and chips. I didn’t see a single pro-war protester on Metro. I saw easily dozens of antis though.

 
 

It takes some balls to make up an imaginary crowd of 30,000 people on the National Mall.

Then imagine the balls required to pretend it was HALF A MILLION…
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/5382.html

 
 

You never actualy proved there was not 30,000.

Also the moon is a giant eggo waffle. Prove me wrong!

I was on the mall that day in spirit (but didn’t get around to signing the pledge) when some guy in his 60s wearing biker denim and leather over his pow/mia shirt and a distinct meth-gleam in his eyes told me that the moon is, in fact, an eggo waffle. He said that, though he had not been to the moon himself, it was all right here in a book.

He showed me the book. It was a Haynes repair manual for 1982-1996 BMW K-series motorcycles. I’m actually pretty familiar with the book and told him that it didn’t say anything about the moon at all. He called me a traitor and said that his friend told him that it did. When I asked him who is friend was, he gave 2 different names.

I emailed Haynes’ editors and asked them what their motorcycle manuals had to say about the composition of the moon, and did they actually say it was a giant eggo waffle as rumored on the intertubes.

I received a reply that they write motorcycle manuals in which the words “giant”, “eggo”, “waffle”, and “moon” never appear. The tone of their reply seemed to imply confusion that I would even ask such a dumbass question.

Some random sympathizer with the original crazed wingnut then pointed out that I had not disproved the eggo-waffle-moon hypothesis nor had I said what the actual composition of the moon was. Which was technically true, if ridiculous.

 
 

I think maybe these people just don’t understand how numbers work, that they actually signify a specific amount of something. There was a guy pictured on Malkin’s site who claimed to have ridden his bike 1500 miles from Tennessee. Seeing a Memphis, in far western Tennessee is only about half that distance from DC I suspect he is, how do you say, full of the shit.

Well now, I’ll tell ya’ll what happened.

Someone told him that to get to DC, he should leave in the morning and ride into the sun. Nobody told him that he should away from the sun in the afternoon. He’d been back and forth from Memphis and Jackson 20 times before he figured it out.

 
 

“should RIDE away from the sun…”

SUBMIT, COMMENT!

 
Random Observer
 

Assertion: The moon is an eggo waffle.
Evidence: A motocycle manual says so.
Counter Argument: No, it doesn’t. At all.
Conclusion: Assertion holds, the moon is an eggo waffle due to lack of contrary evidence.

Up next:

Assertion: George Bush travelled back in time and killed Jesus.
Evidence: It was on an episode of Quantum Leap.
Counter Argument: Quantum Leap is fiction and had no such episode.
Conclusion: George Bush killed Jesus due to lack of contradicting evidence.

This is awesome. I was never very good at proofs in first-order logic but proofs in wignut logic I have apparently mastered quite readily.

Also I have pictures of Bush killing Jesus on my website, but they are offline at the moment.

 
 

wignut

Trent Lott?

 
 

[…] 5: Far-left “comedy” website mocks the 30,000 strong Gathering of Eagles: here, here and here. Have they any shame? Sadly, no. Beware of the comment sections. The commentariot are a […]

 
 

[…] lookee. It’s our special friends again, the phony-nonpartisan phony veteran’s group, Gathering of Eagles — and this time […]

 
 

[…] at military funerals. There are a few pieces that make mention of The Patriot Guard, a group of Gathering of Eagles types called together to battle a non-existent threat. Google doesn’t seem to have much to […]

 
 

Paranoia and patriotism are not the same thing.–C.S. Lewis

They are if you’ve experienced “better living through chemistry” on the scale enjoyed by Dubya.

By the way, the GOE folks left out the really important info for most Wingnuts: Was there free beer?

 
 

I’m sure it’s an innocent error, she meant to say there were 30,000 in the photo.

 
 

Dammit! Jane Fonda was so hot in the sixties! She has apologised for her actions. Jane Fonda was so hot in “Barbarella! I always pictured her as naked on the anti-aircraft gun! Jane Fonda was hot in the sixties! In my locker in Thailand I had a poster of Jane Fonda in a white space outfit, holding a weapon that looked like a sex toy. Damn, Jane Fonda was hot in the sixties!

 
 

[…] afternoon, the Gathering of Eagles people did that thing they do, and deleted the page as if it had never existed. That was bad news for the commenter, Snooper, who […]

 
 

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