Beckapalooza

Glenn Beck and the right-wingers that funded his little teabagger get-together tried real hard to keep some of the stupid out of the gathering and make it look like a huge gathering of normal Americans. They knew they couldn't let their teabagger crowd bring signs or the racism and ignorance would be quickly exposed (because all teabagger gatherings are marked by the racist and misspelled signs).

But when you combine the nutty Beck with thousands of teabaggers the stupid just can't be avoided. Although a few signs showed up anyway, the majority of the crowd was content to let their T-shirts act as their signs. And amazingly, even some of them were misspelled -- and racist (see above picture).

Beck later told an interviewer (from Fox News, of course) that the purpose of the gathering had been to "reclaim the U.S. civil rights movement from politics." Anyone but a Fox News talking head would have been rolling on the floor in laughter at such an absurd statement. Neither Beck nor his teabagger audience has any credibility at all regarding civil rights -- unless you're talking about the right of white christians to force their views on everyone else (which is the very antithesis of civil rights).

And the dishonesty didn't stop there. Beck (and the silly pundits at Fox News) estimated the crowd at upwards of half a million people. He wanted to compare his crowd to the one that gathered to hear Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech which numbered over 250,000 people. Any comparison of Glen Beck and his teabaggers to Dr. King and the crowd who gathered to celebrate a true vision of equal rights is heresy anyway, but the crowd at Beck's gathering was not nearly as large.

CBS News hired a firm to gauge the size of the crowd using aerial photography. They determined the actual size of the crowd was around 87,000. While that's nowhere near the number of people Beck wanted to be there or claimed to be there, I will admit that it was kind of scary to see that many crazy people gathered in one place.