Methinks somebody struck a nerve

—or rather, that a whole bunch of somebodies did, judging by the Left’s reaction to the turnout in D.C. on Saturday. Dan Riehl has a good rundown, as does Charlie Martin (HT: Shout First, Ask Questions Later), while Thomas Lifson quotes a spokesman for the National Park Service as saying,

It is a record. . . . We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.

No question, estimating crowd sizes is tricky under any circumstances; the high-end estimate I’ve seen is 2.3 million people, so it seems reasonable to guess that the actual number of participants was lower, and probably a fair bit lower. On the other hand, the media’s attempts to dismiss the crowd as “tens of thousands” is simply ludicrous, given the pictures and videos; there were, at the very least, hundreds of thousands, as one participant makes clear:

Here is a series of time lapse photos of the march from 8:00 am to 11:30am. The crowd was constantly anywhere from 25 to 50 abreast. I know. I walked in the middle of it, along the sidewalks to move forward quicker, and around the entire circuit, up to and beyond Senate Park. At times, we were so crammed together, breathing became strained. Taking the low number, and assuming a line of 25 crossing a given point every second for three-and-a-half hours, gives you about 300,000. Whatever the actual number, it was certainly magnitudes greater than “tens of thousands.”

At this point in time, I feel pretty confident saying two things: one, the number of people who turned out for this past weekend’s Tea Party is at least comparable to the number who showed up this past January for the inauguration, and probably greater than the record attendance (1.2 million) at LBJ’s inauguration in 1964; and two, the dispute really doesn’t matter. What matters is, it was huge, the largest grassroots event in American history, and however much the media might try to downplay that fact, the politicians in D. C. know how big it was. What they do with that is up to them, but I don’t think any of them are foolish enough to believe the media spin.