Liberal Media Elite Defends Obama's Honor


In the latest version of Newsweek, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson takes on Barack Obama’s first term as president, setting the record straight on a number of Obama’s deficiencies as chief executive, including health care, government safety net programs, national debt, and unemployment. Or I guess that’s what he told the Newsweek staff he was going to do anyway—and apparently the newsweekly doesn’t have fact-checkers to verify things.

Instead, he birthed a giant mound of bull crap, titled “Hit the Road Barack” onto the Internet, where it was immediately picked to bits like crabs feasting on a rotten fish head. That herd of frenzied crabs was, of course, the Liberal Media Elite.

New York magazine has the nicest roundup, including links to commentary from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, James Fallow at The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias from Slate, and Andrew Sullivan, also from Newsweek. Krugman apparently interrupted his vacation to write a rebuttal to Ferguson’s piece. When the liberal Super Best Friends are needed, they answer the call no matter where they are.

But they raise plenty of good points about how Ferugson cherry-picked some facts and figures and misrepresented others to create what appeared to be a cogent argument. But even Ferguson started, and before he admitted to being a past McCain adviser, he knew what he was after. In some ways, he got it. An explosion of truth-be-damned trolls who are willing to seize upon any little bit of anything to further their belief that Obama has to go. Here’s a representative example from a commenter who goes by OMG/ObamaMustGo:

@LarsoninSunnyvale I can. Barack H Obama aka Barry Soetoro is a communist and a fraud ! ! !

If the idea of the article was to alter the course of the national conversation from the Romney/Ryan plan for Medicare to Obama’s record, I guess mission accomplished. I just wonder at what cost to Newsweek.