These days if I bother to read one of Tim Blair’s phoned-in attack pieces, I increasingly get the feeling that he thinks his readers are complete idiots. His style has been reduced to tossing out distorted accusations in one-line sentences, then sitting back and letting his readers respond with the same old tiresome Pavlovian vitriol:ONLY CHARLES MAY CHANGE | Daily Telegraph Tim Blair Blog.

Blair’s outraged today that I don’t believe there were eleventy gazillion people at the Glenn Beck Restoration Minstrel Show.

Having implicitly admitted that the crowd appears “eleventy gazillion” strong, Johnson turns to a trusted source for a far lower estimate. That source? Former Johnson target CBS.

A lot has changed since 2004. Charles Johnson now believes CBS rather than his own eyes.

(I’ll see if I can explain this as clearly as possible to Tim; it does involve a slight bit of nuance though, so the attempt may be futile.)

CBS commissioned the company AirPhotosLive.com, an independent organization that specializes in aerial digital imaging, to perform an analysis of the crowd density based on very high resolution photographs taken when the crowd was at its peak. AirPhotosLive had two experts [Correction: CNN says three experts. – ed.] produce separate analyses of the photos, using different methodologies.

Here’s an interesting account of the process by one of these independent experts, Steve Doig: Counting heads.

I know that as a hard core climate change denier, this kind of analysis isn’t exactly Tim Blair’s forté; it involves left wing socialist concepts like math and science. But a more accurate way to phrase his pithy little comment would be: Charles Johnson believes the outside experts commissioned by CBS rather than Glenn Beck.

UPDATE at 8/29/10 3:42:29 pm:

And sure enough, Blair seized on my “nuance” line like a crazed chihuahua. Who could have predicted that? Nuance is pure rage sauce for the dedicated wingnut.

Charles offers a nuance defence, including this line: “Blair’s outraged today that I don’t believe there were eleventy gazillion people …” Actually, Johnson did believe that the site photograph represented gazillions. That’s why he thought the image was of another rally. Keep on nuancing, pal.

What my pally old pal Blair doesn’t realize is that by my own personal way of counting, “eleventy gazillion” actually comes out to about 87,000 decimal.