Yes, the hypocrisy is hard to miss here.

Conservatives are busy touting the size of Glenn Beck's “Honor” rally last weekend, claiming, as Beck does, that at least 500,000 people attended. But there is no official crowd count and in fact the only scientific attempt to tally the rally size was done by CBS, which hired an outside firm to estimate the crowd size:

To calculate attendance at the Beck rally, AirPhotosLive.com used what is called a surveillance aerostat balloon to take pictures from both above the event and closer to the ground. In the video above, which was provided by the company, you can see some of the images used to come up with a figure.

The firm concluded there were approximately 90,000 people at the rally and right-wing bloggers howled in protest. Of course, they didn't take issue with the science of the estimate. They just didn't like the results and so they whined. A lot.

In response to those complaints, Professor Stephen Doig of Arizona State University, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and crowd estimate expert who worked on the CBS crowd estimate, noted the irony in conservatives attacking his work today. The irony was that back in Jan., 2009, when Doig came up with a crowd estimate for Obama's inauguration, and the estimate (800,000) was much smaller than most other crowd estimates, conservatives loved Doig's work.

He writes:

I am amused to see that those who embraced my Obama inauguration estimate as soberly realistic are now attacking the Beck rally estimate, produced using exactly the same methods, as deliberately biased.

And sure enough, here was Newsbusters early last year specifically touting Doig's work in connection to his Obama inauguration estimate and suggesting news orgs that used larger crowd estimates for that event were (surprise!) liberally biased.

So to recap: When Doig estimated Obama's swearing-in crowd wasn't as large as other people claimed, Doig's work was held up as the unvarnished truth. But today, when Doig estimates Beck's Lincoln Memorial crowd wasn't as large as other people claimed, Doig's work is a joke.

Good to know.