Coyote Blog

So I won't.  Which doesn't mean I haven't found all the squirming on multiple web sites immensely entertaining.  Jeff Goldstein, as is often the case, is perhaps the most entertaining.  While Jeff will never be invited to speak at a MoveOn rally, on the other hand it is about as easy to lump him in with Pat Robertson as to group "Little House on the Prairie" into a double feature with "Team America World Police."

Though I am not convinced it is an especially apt comparison for the Coulter remark, I did particularly note one observation.  Goldstein's commenter said, in part, this:

I am reminded of the whole "niggardly" thing.  Of course, we KNOW what
it means.  But, you cannot really use it unless you want to be
misunderstood and have your message distracted.

Jeff responded:

This is, of course, quite stunning and more than a bit dangerous to the cause of liberalism.

I mean, look again at what Steve just argued:  "Of course, we KNOW what
it means.  But, you cannot really use it unless you want to be
misunderstood and have your message distracted."

Translation: We know what it means, but we must assume nobody else does.  Therefore, their misunderstanding is to be countenanced and massaged"”which, in effect, empowers ignorance
rather than treating it as ignorance.  It is the perfect example of the
intellectual welfare state:  rather than working to force people to
break out a dictionary, we'd rather provide them with succor because,
well, they can't really be expected to learn things on their own,
right?  Those kinds of people?

I don't read Protein Wisdom all the time, so I am not sure if "intellectual welfare" is a term Goldstein uses a lot.  I coined it independently a few years ago, when discussing social security.

Coyote's Law states:

When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by

1. A massive conspiracy coodinated without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people    -OR -
2. Sustained stupidity, confusion and/or incompetance

Assume stupidity.

Protein Wisdom links to this report Caltec/MIT report debunking a lot of the recent voter fraud accusations.  Here is the money quote that is a dead-on reformulation of Coyote's Law:

Well, I don't want to write off legitimate questions about the integrity of the voting system. But turn the question around: Which is more likely -- that an exit polling system that has been consistently wrong and troubled turned out to be wrong and troubled again, or that a vast conspiracy carried out by scores and scores of county and state election officials was successfully carried off to distort millions of American votes?