Words Don’t Mean Things

at least not to the AP:

Romney did better among more conservative voters, while McCain and Paul each got about one in five moderates, who made up about 20 percent of the electorate.

OK, what kind of a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul? I can’t think of any position that he takes that could be considered “moderate.” He’s what most people would call an extremist*. If someone called themselves a “moderate,” or someone whom the AP would call a “moderate” would vote for Ron Paul then the word has no meaning whatsoever.

And frankly, I find people who call themselves “moderate” to generally be people with no firm or coherent political principles whatsoever. All it really means is that they are neither “liberal” or conservative, so the media types find them difficult to pigeonhole. And given the large number of possibilities of positions one can have without being in either of those media pigeonholes, that means that we can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever about them. We need a different word for such people than “moderate.”

* Not that there’s anything wrong with that–so am I, on many issues. I’m just (as I think that Glenn Reynolds once said of himself) an eclectic one.