Thanks To Liberal Bloggers

[Kathianne]

Niall Ferguson gets a second bite of the apple to argue that Obama must go:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-defends-newsweek-cover-correct-this-bloggers.html


<header class="clearfix"> Niall Ferguson Defends Newsweek Cover: Correct This, Bloggers <time class="timestamp" property="dc:created" datetime="2012-08-21T16:13:00.000Z" pubdate="pubdate">Aug 21, 2012 12:13 PM EDT </time> First, duck the argument. Second, nitpick. Third, vilify. That’s what Niall Ferguson says liberal bloggers did after reading his Newsweek story on Obama’s record. Here, he offers a point-by-point defense of his argument.




(Page 1 of 4)
</header> <figure class="multimedia section"> http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-defends-newsweek-cover-correct-this-bloggers/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.503.jpg/1345568318551.cached.jpg <figcaption class="figcaption"> </figcaption> </figure> The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers.

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Lord Macaulay famously wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” But the spectacle of the American liberal blogosphere in one of its almost daily fits of righteous indignation is not so much ridiculous as faintly sinister. Why? Because what I have encountered since the publication of my Newsweek article (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html) criticizing President Obama looks suspiciously like an orchestrated attempt to discredit me...

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Niall Ferguson gets a second bite of the apple to argue that Obama must go:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-defends-newsweek-cover-correct-this-bloggers.html

Criticise the messiah face the wrath of his idiot bots! Some of them consider it an honor to attack those that dare speak the TRUTH about obama. I doubt that the world has ever witnessed a bigger group of fooooools than diehard bamboy bots >>> I know I never have..-Tyr

[Kathianne]

Criticise the messiah face the wrath of his idiot bots! Some of them consider it an honor to attack those that dare speak the TRUTH about obama. I doubt that the world has ever witnessed a bigger group of fooooools than diehard bamboy bots >>> I know I never have..-Tyr

Indeed, but they gave him fodder. All the better!

[Little-Acorn]

Indeed, but they gave him fodder. All the better!

Are you saying the Obamanites gave this author, fodder? That is, gave the author good reasons to laugh at them, criticize them etc.?

Or that the author gave the Obamanites such reasons?

[Kathianne]

Interesting perspective on the OP:

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/08/23/ferguson-cleans-house/

Much more at link:


...Bottom line on the foreign policy front: “America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement.”


I said that I found Ferguson’s analysis damning. So, I gather, did the Left. For out of those mephitic swamps of “progressive” animus has risen a great cloud of anguished repudiation. It’s a violent, unpleasant, and ultimately unconvincing display, but it is certainly full of angry pathos.


It has already elicited from Ferguson a long, detailed, and utterly deadly point-by-point reply (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/21/niall-ferguson-defends-newsweek-cover-correct-this-bloggers.html), which is as entertaining as it is authoritative. Ferguson begins with a splendid quotation from the historian Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay had not had the experience of witnessing the left-wing commentariat tie itself in moralistic knots in its hapless attempt to answer facts with name-calling. Connoisseurs of futility will find it as entertaining as psychologists will find it alarming.


Ferguson shows in unanswerable detail that his critics adopt a three-pronged strategy of evasiveness. First, they avoid his central arguments. Second, they claim to be challenging the facts he has marshaled, when all they really do is purvey opinions masquerading as facts. Third, they nitpick and name-call.


Ferguson’s whole piece is worth reading; I’ll confine myself to two bits. Responding to what Ferguson says about Obama’s notorious “You didn’t build that” speech, one critic says: “It’s bizarre that Ferguson thinks government policies didn’t help create America’s middle class. America was the first country to make high school compulsory.” Ferguson:



Fact checked and — oh no! I really did get that wrong. It was the government that created the middle class, as well as the Golden Gate Bridge! Remind me to tell Karl Marx about this. It will come as news to him that, contrary to his life’s work, the superstructure in fact created the base. (Come to think of it, this is going to come as shock to a lot of American liberals too. Imagine! The state actually created the bourgeoisie! Who knew?)


Good stuff, no?


And then there are the professors, those holders of life tenure and supposed champions of free speech, who have demanded that Ferguson be fired from his job at Harvard. One non-entity from Berkeley (it would be Berkeley) wrote a column under the title: “Fire His Ass Now.” “Convene a committee at Harvard ,” this loathsome product of our “liberal” education suggested, “to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.” Then there was the reliably obtuse James Fallows writing at The Atlantic, who wrote “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize.”


To which Ferguson replied, “As an Oxford alum, I laugh.”...