Thought I’d take a stab at establishing a new series: since the lies from the right wing are coming in so heavily and consistently, it’s impossible to blog separately on them all. So instead I’ll try to shoot off smaller posts documenting the more egregious whoppers of the day.

Today, aside from the lie about New Jersey and Virginia being “referendums” on Obama and his health care initiative (and how we should ignore NY-23), there are a couple of really good ones:

---

The first is quite a whopper, and it has roots: tea-baggers and conservatives in general have come to habitually over-inflate crowd estimates at their events. See this crowd at Bachmann’s thug rally?

On G. Gordon Libby’s radio show today, his producer, Franklin Raff, was on the ground at the rally and reported that a million people were in attendance. Now, I know that crowds look bigger on the ground, but a million? Police estimates were at about 4,000, which looks about right, if not a bit high for the crowd in the photo above.

Eric Cantor put the crowd at “tens of thousands.” Bachmann herself boasted to drawing 20,000 to 45,000 people.

All of this echoes the tea-bagger 9/12 march on D.C. which had “two million” people in attendance. Other conservative numbers ranged from 500,000 to 1.2 million. Official crowd attendance was gauged at 75,000, which was immediately viciously attacked by right-wingers–after which official sources shut up, fearful of being labeled as left-wing shills. That kind of intimidation makes accurate numbers hard to come by, but I would guess that the real numbers did not exceed a few hundred thousand, at most. Making the right-wing case even less believable were a string of photos they posted of the event–which turned out to be fakes.

---

In the long-standing tradition of right-wingers labeling any terror suspect or other nefarious criminal “Registered Democrat,” conservatives are now trying to label Nidal Madik Hasan, the gunman at Fort Hood, a someone who “played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House.” Did you get that? The terrorist was an Obama advisor.

In fact, no. He was, in truth one of about 300 audience members, his name listed only because he RSVP’d the event. There is no indication that he did anything more than simply sat there and watched. His level of participation could have been matched by literally anyone off the street who wished to attend. Nor did the ‘task force’ play any official role–it was an independent university organization, the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) at George Washington University, which had no official role in the Obama transition.

So we go from an off-the street audience member at an unofficial university event that played no official role in the Obama transition, to someone who “played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama’s transition into the White House.” Not surprisingly, the charge was made by none other than Jerome Corsi, the Swift boat man himself.

The story went across the right-wing news media and blogosphere (links to a few examples), and no doubt millions on the right have now heard the story and fully believe it.

To take such a tragic, horrific event and to squeeze a partisan political smear out of it–this is quintessential right-wing vomitous spew.

---

Finally, putting together the Bachmann thuggery and right-wing vomitous spew, this photo is of a banner at the Bachmann rally:

Need I elaborate?

---

All in all, a normal day for the right wing.