The Washington Times' op-ed page today inadvertently illustrates why you can never trust a right-wing crowd estimate at a right-wing event.

Check out Suzanne Fields' column describing last Sunday's protest of the planned Islamic community center in Manhattan (emphasis added):

We stood together in the rain on a Sunday in late summer, most of us as protesters, some of us angrier than others, and some of us there as observers to take the temperature of anger at West Broadway and Park Place. We stood close to Ground Zero, as the place where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood will always be called. This was holy ground. We could feel it.

Many in the crowd of the 500 or so men and women protesting the construction of what New Yorkers call “the Ground Zero Mosque” had been touched directly by terrorism, having lost friends, family, husbands, wives and lovers among the 3,000 Americans who died there. Many of the dead were cops and firemen who died trying to save others. Angry politics was the order of the day, with one side crying shame at those who “show no sensitivity for sacred ground,” the other accusing the first group of having no regard for the founding ideals of the republic.

Now compare that to the first sentence of Frank Gaffney's Times column (emphasis added):

As I looked out at the thousands of people assembled near Ground Zero on Sunday to oppose the construction of a mega-mosque there, I was reminded of Winston Churchill's famous line that inspirited Britain at the first sign the tide was turning in World War II: “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Five-hundred? Thousands? Those aren't even close. Why don't we just call it a million? (For what it's worth, The Associated Press called it “hundreds.”)

This isn't even the first time right-wing media have put forward dubious crowd estimates at anti-Park51 rallies. Serial Muslim-basher Pam Geller said that “close to 5,000 showed up” to a anti-Park51 rally in June and that “some estimates ranged as high as 10,000.” (Further confusing the issue, the headline of her post declared “upwards of eight thousand” showed up.)

Of course, this is all part of what seems to be a right-wing tradition of wildly inflating crowd estimates at right-wing rallies. As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert has noted, the right-wing blogosphere, led by Michelle Malkin, pushed the lie that 2 million people attended last September's anti-Obama tea party protest in Washington, D.C -- which was off the mark only by about 1,930,000. That lie was then repeated throughout the conservative media.

Since then, we've seen habitual liar Jim Hoft laughably inflate the crowd at a tea party event in Missouri and several right-wing outlets desperately try to boost crowd totals at a March tea party event in Nevada.

The trend is quite clear: You simply can't trust right-wing crowd estimates at these kinds of events. And while we're on the subject, what should the over/under be on right-wing turnout estimates of Glenn Beck's 8-28 rally? One million? Five million? Whatever the estimate is, it's sure to be wildly off the mark