To mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, tens of thousands of people gathered near the Lincoln Memorial to listen to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, and dozens more speak about a variety of hot-button topics, including voter ID law, civil rights, discriminatory laws, and more. Additionally, a pre-march rally for D.C. statehood was held at the D.C. War Memorial, where Mayor Gray and other D.C. politicians spoke out for statehood rights.

But while this weekend’s march and statehood rally was a prime opportunity for D.C. politicians to make the pitch for statehood, the trash left behind in the aftermath ended up as a lightening rod for some conservative writers. With the baiting headline “Is this Martin Luther King’s legacy? National Mall covered in garbage,” The Washington Times’ Emily Miller wonders if the condition the Mall was in after the rally means that D.C. isn’t ready for budget autonomy.

Mr. Gray is hoping that Congress gives him budget authority this year, but people who think it is OK to leave their signs on the ground for someone else to clean up can’t handle more political autonomy.

Uh, ok.

So, according to Miller’s argument, the trash left behind by the thousands who attended the rally—and the organizers lack of cleaning up every single piece within two days— means that D.C. isn’t ready for budget autonomy and the other privileges that come with statehood. Because that logic makes perfect sense.

Of course, this isn’t the first time conservative journalists have attacked the aftermath of liberal-leaning rallies. After the “One Nation Working Together” in 2010, The Daily Caller’s Jeff Winkler attacked the rally for being “much trashier than Fox News host Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally.” The area around the Lincoln Memorial for the “One Nation Working Together” rally, which was also organized by Rev. Al Sharpton, had, according to Winkley, “become a landfill.” He even compared the scene to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city wiped off the map by a volcano:

Fast food remnants littered the area below the Memorial. Empty water bottles were omnipresent as were discarded stick-mounted signs. The limited park-provided trash bins were almost works of art. The trashcan heaps bursting upwards looked like images of volcanoes caught mid-eruption, to say nothing of the areas surrounding the bins. Pompeii never had a chance.

Liberal or not, there’s no question that any rally on the National Mall will result in an abundance of trash left behind, but it takes time to clean it up. With a rally that draws tens of thousands to the Lincoln Memorial, it’s going to take more than a day to clean up the aftermath. There’s no way that that should be reasoning as to why D.C. isn’t ready to handle statehood. The argument just isn’t logical.

“The trashed National Mall on Sunday demonstrates disrespect for our nation and other citizens,” Miller wrote. “The shameful mess left behind from the anniversary march dishonors King’s memory.”

Just, no.