Forgive me for beating a dead horse, but I just can't resist a parting shot at Don Blankenship's pathetic Friends of America Labor Day rally, sponsored in part by spineless Verizon Wireless.

Someone forwarded me this hilarious column by Charleston Gazette columnist Bill Lynch, who attended the rally.  This man was at Woodstock, so he knows a crowd when he sees one -- and apparently there wasn't much of one on top of that mined mountaintop.

Now, Blankenship promised 100,000 rally attendees and I even heard that right-wing blowhard Glenn Beck claimed that over 1 million people showed up.  Not so, reports Bill Lynch:

I remember taking a long look at the audience gathered toward the stage, then looking at the gaping expanse of dusty, rocky ground behind them.

I giggled.

I thought conservatives were supposed to be good at math. What was referred to, as the largest Tea Party in America, was about the size of a county fair  -- if you didn't count the livestock.

Bill writes that the rally wasn't at all what he expected.  He almost didn't go, for fear of traffic, a surly crowd, and "a heavy-handed political message courtesy of Massey Energy." 

Turns out he had nothing to worry about after all.  He was able to zip right in to the event and snag a parking spot up close.  He ambled up near the stage just as Fox big-mouth-on-campus Sean Hannity was "squawking about liberals, conservatives and the terror that is Barack Obama."  

It seems the crowd proved more interested in the free concert by Hank Williams, Jr.  Ditto the funnel cake booth, which did better business than the "lonely little corral where you could learn how global warming was a hoax.  Nobody much cared."

After Hank finished singing, it started to rain and most people migrated to the parking lot.  The only traffic problem Bill encountered was the crush of cars heading down the mountain toward home.

Grassroots Fail

The back story is that the coal industry hired a PR firm to concoct this faux grassroots group to support its dirty energy political agenda.  But as is usually the case with industry's propaganda-driven tactics, the group was quickly exposed as nothing more than pure astroturf -- that is, a phony, industry-funded front group utterly lacking in genuine citizen support or involvement.  

In fact, the faces for FACES are not real people who support the industry -- the soul-less PR firm that put this project together simply used stock photos to populate the website.  Kudos to the good folks at Appalachian Voices for debunking this effort.

My buddy Jeff Biggers has all the dirty details on this troubling yet hilarious fiasco.

In your face FACES -- what a bunch of fossil fools!

[UPDATE: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently covered the FACES scandal, referring to it as "momentous political fakery."]

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