Last Show No Sell-out on the Magical Misery Tour

Cindy Sheehan's meager cadre of 29 protestors was outnumbered by the press covering them Wednesday, in what has now become a very familiar pattern of stage-managed performances and shameless media hype.

The culmination of this month-and-a-half of self-aggrandizing behavior will culminate this weekend as two communist spin-off groups tries to herd what some hopefully boast will be "hundreds of thousands" of Stalinists, Marxists, anarchists, radical feminists, left-over hippies, oppressed didgeridoo players and hermaphrodite dwarves into something of a unified protest. All of these protestors support the troops, and will gladly prove it if they can get within spitting distance of the White House.

Other sources don't seem quite as optimistic of a turnout that high, dropping that number into just tens of thousands.

So how should one estimate just how many souls Saint Cindy might gather on the final leg of the leg of the Magical Misery Tour? A simple, but effective gauge might be to see how many hotel rooms are still available in the greater Washington, DC area. With a major political protest occurring this weekend, hotel rooms in the greater D.C. area should be few and far between.

But they aren't.

A visit to Orbitz or Travelocity, or other travel sites shows that rooms in the D.C. area could be had anywhere from downtown Washington D.C. out to Fairfax, VA 20 miles out, from $80.00+.

Perhaps the D.C. area has so many hotel rooms that an influx of 100,000 people isn't that much of a problem. I find it far more plausible that Cindy Sheehan's terrorist-appeasing, America-hating rhetoric has finally come home to roost.

Update: Added NY Sun's revised crowd estimate.