O’Reilly once again shows why his credibility with long-time conservative viewers is sliding.

On this evening’s show, during a discussion between O’Reilly, Tammy Bruce and Mike Gallagher on the recent conservative victories over Obama and his cronies (Van Jones, ACORN, etc…), Gallagher mentioned the presence of a million protesters at the Capitol on 9/12. O’Reilly, citing the since-discredited fire department number of 75,000, went out of his way to ‘correct’ Gallagher.

Alright, look….although the general consensus is that Gallagher’s number is high in terms of the number in attendance at any one time, the lowball 75,000 figure, widely attributed to the DC fire department, has been shown to be false almost since it was first put forth on the afternoon of the 12th.

So, where did the 75,000 number come from? According to Politifact (via pajamasmedia):

Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, said the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. But the day of the rally, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.

“It was in no way an official estimate,” he said.

We asked Piringer whether there were enough protesters to fill the National Mall, as depicted in the photograph.

“It was an impressive crowd,” he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, the crowd “only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street,” he said.

In the days since and through a number of different estimation methods, the number of attendees present at any one time seems to be settling in somewhere between 250,000 and 350,000, with total attendance somewhere north, to far north, to very far north of 400,000, to “damn, there were a lot of freakin’ people there!“.

Rather than re-do the work of others, both pajamas media and political gumbo have taken their own in-depth looks at the numbers.

Conservative Nation subscribe to the ‘full back to third street’ estimate, including Pennsylvania and Maryland Aves, that when compared against park service crowd size estimation methods (see chart at the top of this page) gives us approximately 250,000 at the capitol. Unlike O’Reilly, I was there and can say with absolute confidence that this number can safely be used as an absolute lower bound.

Considering the degree of pride he seems to take in his show’s investigative prowess, there’s no way O’Reilly can be unaware that the number he continues to cite are off by at least a factor of four.

Conservative Nation has no interest in continuing to hammer these attendance numbers, but as long as O’Reilly persists in his attempts, however subtle, to minimize the TEA Party movement, we will continue to call him out on it.

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-Cnation