“We create our own reality,” an un-named official in Dubya’s service famously said in 2004 (no, not that unnamed official). Now they’re out of office, they have to photoshop it. Thus the plaintive cries from the organisers of the 12/09 Tea Party March on Washington DC that they said had fielded 1.5 million attendees.

Oh no they di’int.

Attendance was estimated at 70,000, for a march that had been on the cards for months, organised by Glenn Beck, a FOX News crazy with about 5-6 million viewers over any given week.

To rebut the official figures, conservatives circulated a photo of marchers stretching all the way up The Mall — marchers in 1997, the truth easily checkable by the absence of a museum built in 2004. The march in the photo seems to be from a march by “The Promise Keepers”, a right-wing whiny white man movement that went nowhere also.

Who’s to blame? The left, to make the right look stupid, say the right, apparently angry at someone muscling in on their territory.