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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (197771)	8/20/2012 11:00:59 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541354

It's sort of weird how much Ferguson's piece has stirred things up. Ok, it was the cover of Newsweek, but Newsweek has gone down sort of a weird path, where it's not really anything like a , well, news weekly anymore. So the Daily Beast, which I guess is sort of the Newsweek website these days, has this article up: Media Reactions to Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson-Obama Cover Story thedailybeast.com There's 3 or 4 winger apologists out of the 17 articles cited, the rest are not kind to Niall, who seems to have irritated quite a lot of people of late. Irreverent and caustic towards the political organization formerly known as the party of Lincoln as I am, this was my favorite Niall Ferguson Trolls Everyone in Newsweek Alex Pareene, Salon Pareene acknowledges the “tons of very legitimate and compelling argument against the Obama presidency,” but laments that Ferguson “based his article on a bunch of crap he made up.” What the hell, if Romney can base a whole campaign on crap he's making up, why shouldn't Ferguson get to write an article the same way? The context of the above, and a bit more, from salon.com , the beast missed the link on that one: So Ferguson wrote a Newsweek cover (Newsweek has become “trolling America weekly” since Tina Brown took over) about how he thinks Obama shouldn’t be president anymore, and while there are tons of very legitimate and compelling arguments against the Obama presidency, Ferguson instead based his article on a bunch of crap he made up. And the piece is full of just really obvious fallacies and little moments of mendacity like this: In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Hm! Weird that one thing is measured from January 2009 and the other thing from January 2008, right? So his piece is just fundamentally dishonest, top to bottom. But again, if you're endorsing Romney, isn't it sort of your job to be "fundamentally dishonest, top to bottom"? I mean, follow the leader and all that? Ferguson certainly seems to be a pompous little twit, but making up crap is just sort of what Republicans do these days, isn't it?