Via Amanda Marcotte, ace political statistician Nate Silver puts the scope of exaggeration by organizers of this weekend’s teabagger rally into perspective. Organizers claim there were two million people, pretty much everyone else put the figure at closer to 60,000.

Silver uses a vivid, and funny, but unfortunately gendered analogy.

That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration—it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

He said it here.

I’m, um, not an ace mathematician so check my figures, but there’s a hidden insult in Silver’s number that a) makes it an unfortunate gendered insult but also b) diminishes the scope of Kibbe’s lie. Short version: Kibbe’s penis would have to be 1.5 inches long for his exaggeration to equal only 53 inches. Assuming he’s of average size instead then it’s like him telling people his penis is 196 inches long! Or 16 feet!

Point by implying Kibbe has a smaller penis Silver also made him seem like less of a liar.

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Long answer, showing my work:

First, let’s do the numbers to see just how big an insult Silver has cooked up.

60,000: Consensus crowd size estimate, discarding wingnut outlier
1,000,000: First estimate claimed by FreedomWorks organizers
1,500,000: Second estimate claimed by FreedomWorks organizers
2,000,000: Further inflated estimates by unidentified tweets

1,000,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 16.7
53 inches / 16.7 exaggeration factor = 3.2 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

1,500,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 25
53 inches / 25 exaggeration factor = 2.1 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

2,000,000 / 60,000 = exaggeration factor 33.3
53 inches / 33.3 exaggeration factor = 1.6 inch penis-size estimate for Kibbe by Silver

Unfortunately-gendered insults aside, and assuming Silver has no direct measurements of the specific teabagging wingnuts in question, then based on average penis sizes worldwide Silver would still only be exaggerating downward by a factor of 2 or 3, compared to an upwards exaggeration factor between 16.7 and 33.3 by FreedomWorks organizers.

Not that Kibbe comes out looking any better. Assuming he’s of average size then using the same exaggeration factors he used for his crowd estimates it’s the equivalent of him telling people that his penis is not 53 but between 98.5 and 196.4 inches! (That would be between 8 and 16 feet! Or for non-anti-science or French-cheese-eating types between 2.5 and nearly 5 meters! Or for football fans that would be between 2.7 and 5.5 yards!)

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Anyway, I guess me being a political sex blogger means I’m the one who has to grouse about the use and misuse of highly gendered body parts in political discourse. Even though he’s a racist, violence-advocating anti-democratic demagogue Matt Kibbe’s body is no more Nate Silver’s business than, say, Michelle Bachman’s body would be. In fact, because they’re both racist, violence-advocating, anti-democratic demagogues their bodies should be the least of our concerns.