Niall Ferguson, right-wing asshole, targets the gays

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, Niall, it's all well and good that you apologized, if only after the shit hit the fan, saying that your "comments about John Maynard Keynes... were as stupid as they were insensitive," specifically your anti-gay comments that, as Tom Kostigan of Financial Advisor wrote, "Keynes' economic philosophy was flawed and he didn't care about future generations because he was gay and didn't have children," but you can't just apologize away your bigotry (which apparently lies at the heart of your aggressively right-wing views, your anti-Keynesian austerianism):

My disagreements with Keynes's economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

Not when it wasn't exactly an "off-the-cuff response," as you suggested, what with your history of making similar remarks, your history of connecting Keynes's economic theories to his homosexuality.

Isn't the Internet great, Niall? You "apologize," you deny, but immediately you're exposed as a fraud.

Niall Ferguson says Obama wants war

By Frank Moraes

I have long thought that Niall Ferguson was an idiot, but I think that may be the wrong way to think about him. Ferguson is just evil.

I understand being partisan. I certainly am. But to be only partisan is to be only interested in power. Yesterday, Ferguson has wrote an article over at The Daily Beast called "Niall Ferguson on Obama's Possible Mideast Surprise." His argument is that Obama is down in the polls and that he will try some kind of "October Surprise," or a "Wag the Dog" move.

Let's just step back from this for a moment. In what universe is Obama losing in the polls? In the conservative media bubble, of course! In the real world, the national polls show Romney very slightly ahead of Obama. But more important, the national polls mean absolutely, positively nothing. We elect presidents based upon the electoral college, and in that contest, President Obama is and has been the likely winner for months.

In an attempt to mollify conservatives, their own personal alternative media are providing lots of articles to sooth them so they won't fall into a funk and end up missing the election. Typical of this is Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard who claims that Romney is doing really well with the "independent" voters and this will prove decisive. You know what I think of this kind of wishful thinking: it is more wishful than thinking. But this kind of thinking is all over. Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review writes about this in "The momentum behind a misleading narrative." Basically, Romney gained in the week before and the week after the first debate. And that's it. There is no miracle on the horizon.

But Niall Ferguson thinks there is and he thinks that the Obama campaign thinks the same thing. What will they do? Don't worry: Ferguson has a thought. Obama will tell Israel to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. This makes sense from a Republican standpoint: it is just the way they roll; since they will do anything for power, everyone else must act the same way. But with a clear-eyed view of the real world this is nonsense. Would the president really start a war just to win re-election? A democratic president, that is? And if he did, would the people really believe that it wasn't an act of political desperation? After all, why not wait another week and do it after the election? And who, other than wackjob conservatives like Ferguson, wants a war with Iran? It is a ridiculous idea: Obama weighing his choices, "Should I work on getting out the vote or just start a war with Iran? It's such a tough choice!"

Ferguson isn't calling for war explicitly, of course. He is calling for Israeli strikes on Iran's alleged nuclear laboratories. But this is the same as calling for war. This is, in fact, an act of war. And having Israel start it would not make it any less our war.

Hopefully with Newsweek breaking away from The Daily Beast I won't have to read Ferguson again. But I fear I am being far more wishful than even the conservative poll watchers.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Fallows v. Ferguson

By Mustang Bobby

Niall Ferguson, a tenured professor of history at Harvard, wrote a cover story for Newsweek making the case for the defeat of President Obama. Numerous pundits and fact-checkers have gone over the article and pronounced it flawed, including blaming the president for bad things that happened a year before he took office.

But leave it to James Fallows of The Atlantic (and a Harvard alum) to really give Mr. Ferguson his comeuppance, and it is a thing of beauty:

-- "I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win."

According to an article in the Telegraph this year, Ferguson has chosen America over Britain because the intellectual life back home is so shallow. It is good that he is deepening our discourse with observations like these. (To the best of my knowledge, he is not a U.S. citizen, which I note only because it gives the "good loser" and "want badly to win" observations an unusual edge.)

There is lots more, which you can judge for yourself. Let me re-establish the point: I have no complaint with anyone making a strong case against Obama, or in his favor. That's what an election year is for. My point concerns the broadside pamphleteering nature of his argument, which is no worse than what we expect on cable-news talk shows but also no better. And it comes from someone trading heavily on the prestige that goes with being a tenured professor at the world's leading university.

[...]

You can say these things if you're a talk-show host or a combatant on some cable-news gabfest. To me this is not what the tradition of Veritas and the search for scholarly enlightenment is supposed to exemplify. Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson's students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.

Game, set, match. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)