House Republicans protest frivolous Dem bills; introduce frivolous GOP bill celebrating Fox News D.C. protests, cite inflated crowd sizes

Every day I think conservatives have finally reached some plateau of ridiculousness in making a mockery of themselves and their country, and then something like this happens, reminding me that GOP stupidity is apparently boundless.

I bring Fox News into this mostly because of the faux outrage from the right over the White House acknowledging what anyone with a brain has known for years; namely that FNC and the Republican Party might as well go to Massachusetts and get married. Fox aired nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the “tea party protests” – protests only attended by Republicans, along with a smattering of eager white supremacists) while other networks like MSNBC covered the events, but didn’t obsess over them.

They were written about in every major paper including the New York Times.

That alone ought to be cause enough to seriously reconsider the impartiality of Fox News, but that would have been a pretty obvious waste of time when Fox News employees – on-air hosts after pimping these protests on their shows – joined the “protests” to give what amounted to keynote speeches that Fox was covering. That is something you never see the other networks doing, mind you, Keith Olbermann never gave speeches at Iraq war protests and neither has anyone else that I’m aware of.

But FNC aside, along comes news that 75 House Republicans – people who generally have a reputation as nutjobs for trying to pass “birther” legislation posthaste like Michelle Bachman – are trying to use Congress to officially endorse the Fox News rallies with a resolution that repeats the long-debunked lies about crowd size.

All this after John Boehner issued a teary-eyed press release complaining about Democrats wasting time with frivolous bills while unemployment “nears 10 percent”.

If you recall, and you should since this was a hot topic not too long ago, a director for FreedomWorks – a corporate lobbying group that was a principal organizer and founder of the original fake tea party protests (they represent health insurance companies, naturally, not the boobs who showed up at these rallies) – lied in front of a crowd about the the size of the D.C. event, citing a non-existent ABC News report putting the crowd at around one million people. An obscure conservative blogger (no offense intended by that, just stating a fact here, it’s not like I’m not obscure as well) took to Twitter and immediately doubled that lie up to two million people, and that tweet rocketed around the conservative echo chamber the rest of the day, week, and still even now, despite being debunked within minutes.

ABC denied having made any such report (and to this date nobody has been able to “find” it) and the only semi-official estimates put the actual crowd size at somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand people. Not insubstantial, but a far cry from the two million figure from FreedomWorks.

Now, thanks to dishonest Republicans who love to lie apparently, those bloated figures are sitting in House Resolution 870 with nearly 80 endorsements:

Whereas estimates of the number of people who peacefully marched from Freedom Plaza to the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on September 12, 2009, range as high as 1,700,000 marchers;

Whereas all 50 States were represented in the march;

There is no proof of course that “all 50 states were represented”, they are simply making that up just as they are lying about the size of the crowd.

Seven years have passed and we’re still waiting for House Republicans to introduce a resolution commemorating the Iraq war protests that Fox News didn’t cover, and certainly didn’t send their biggest on-air stars to speak at.

Or these useless Republicans could take their own advice, shut up, and get back to work.