Fascinoma

The Lobbyist and I attended Stewart/Colbert rally on Saturday and had a big time, especially at the afterparty. It was by far the biggest crowd I've ever seen on the Mall, and a very witty, decorative, polite, and hope-inspiring crowd it was. My favorite sign read: "I'm already regretting my decison to carry this sign all day."

I snarkily predicted at the time that the corporate media would minimize the numbers in any way they could; I figured they'd reduce the participants' numbers to about the Pentagon's kill numbers for Iraq. But in at least one case they went another way.

Well the Post went about 220k, CBS 225. Seems low to me, but whatever. It's three times as many as the Glenn Beck cross-burning, brought out -- and they were mostly stupid, fat, angry white guys, many on the government dole in one way or another, and yet mortally afraid the government will do something for brown people. Their response is then rather like the ape's tendency to growl at strangers who appear at the small water hole, and this is consistent with fascism's engagement of the reptile brain.

As someone pointed out, the IQ, the energy, the age and child-bearing potential of the crowd on Saturday should spell doom for the Reich. But, as I've often said (after Stalin) it's not who votes who counts, it's who counts the votes. And given that the GOP has devolved into stooges of the oligarchs, we can expect that their general trend for disenfranchisement, disillusionment and in general suppression of democratic action will continue. That's what their voter fraud thing is all about. You can tell what a Republican is up to these days by what he's on about -- if he's raving against perversion he's got a rent boys waiting in a suite. If he's warning about pickpockets he's got his hand on your wallet. If he's on about voter fraud, he's doing all he can to rig the election. Of course all this got a big boost from Citizens United, now the oligarchs can sell any lie they can afford, and you can bet the booboisie is buying. Expect them to inflame the masses whenever one of their flunkies loses an election. The citizen is lot less than 3/5 of an individual as a result.

Anyway, I'm flipping channels first thing this morning, looking for local weather, and I alight briefly on CNN's segment about the rally. It was predicably weak. There's no love lost between Jon Stewart and CNN, so that is perhaps to be expected. But the segement ended with the news-bimbo slavishly reciting, without further comment, Glenn Beck's ludicrous claim of 300,000 to 600,000 folks at his last rally. I was a bit surprised, but then I remembered, CNN were the folks who gave Beck his start on TV. So of course however many wefre there on Saturday, CNN would report that Beck brought out more. Expect a lot more of this sort of math in the future, only expect it about balloting.