If you haven’t yet, take a look at the Fallows articles that mistermix John linked to. Fallows finds this:
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.
Fallows then points out that (a) Obama took office in January 2009 and (b) gives a fairly complicated chart that shows this: there are more private sector jobs now than when Obama took office in January 2009. I’m sure Ferguson and Newsweek would claim that they know Obama took office in January 2009 but it’s a fair comparison with 2008 blah blah blah.
But it’s extremely likely that Ferguson either botched the date on which Obama took office or thought we’d lost 4.3 million private sector jobs since January 2009. Certainly, what he wrote suggests that he thinks that. At best, it’s willful attempt to deceive the reader. At worst, it suggests that he’s drooling moron working for a magazine I wouldn’t wipe my ass with.
Anyway, shut Newsweek and Harvard the fuck down.
Now.
TooManyJens
Great post title.
Julia Grey
Good granny. What a flaming idiot.
Professor
Leave Niall alone, he is a Historian NOT an Economist. Also he is a clueless Republican who has NEVER told the truth in his life!
Hawes
If we get rid of Hahvahd, can we keep their choreographed baseball team? My wife thinks they’re cute.
karen marie
The November 2011 London Review of Books article to which Fallows links was even more enlightening, I thought. What passes for “intelligence” in rightwing circles is a fright.
schrodinger's cat
What about Yale do we shut it down too, for giving us Dubya?
DougJ
@schrodinger’s cat:
They don’t employ him.
Villago Delenda Est
2008, 2009. What’s a difference of 12 months between friends, anyways?
I’m surprised that Ferguson didn’t try to pretend that Obama took over directly from Bill Clinton. After all, that seems to be the standard GOP meme nowadays…that the deserting coward malassminstration didn’t exist…or was actually liberal, not “conservative.”
reflectionephemeral
FWIW, Brad DeLong isn’t far off from your conclusion:
DeLong is wrong, of course. There is no limit. Krugman pointed that out years ago.
schrodinger's cat
@karen marie: Why is this apologist for the British Empire doing specials for PBS?
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: Good point!
dmsilev
As a proud alumnus of MIT, I object to the notion of shutting Harvard down. They make such excellent targets for elaborate practical jokes.
Valdivia
why so angry DougJ ;)
Loved that title.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
I think you spell it like this:
SHUT NEWSWEEK AND HARVARD THE FUCK DOWN !!!!!!
or just
SHUT IT DOWN!!!!!!!
poco
Oy!! John Cole provided the great linkage, not mistermix.
That said, hate Fergie with the blazing heat of a thousand burning suns, so more blow-torching heading his way the better.
Comrade Jake
Newsweek jumped the shark at least 10 years ago.
matt
if he botched the date, how did he get it right at the beginning of the same sentence?
Professor
Do you think he can ever live this crap down? All his credibility,if he had any, is SHOT!
tmm
Ah, that’s a Cole post, not a mistermix one.
SamR
January 20, 2009 specifically. Meaning that if you were to track it by month, it’d be far more accurate to start on February 1, 2009 than on January 1, 2009.
Starting on January 1, 2008 is clown shoes, of course.
Hunter Gathers
I think it’s Tina Brown’s mission in life to employ every moronic Tory ex-pat that sets foot in this country. Job postings for Newsweek must read as follows –
‘Are you British? A conservative? Do you have that innate ability to kick the poor, the sick and anyone who’s not a Captain of Industry right in balls fifteen times before breakfast? Than you, good sir or madam, have a future here at Newsweek! Just submit your resume, salary demands and a 5000 word essay on how much you hate those born without the wherewithal to attend Oxford or be related to the Windsors to : Tina Brown’s Vanity Project. Act now and receive, free of charge, a copy of one of Tina’s Royal gossip tomes, or a free Andrew Sullivan Oaken cup with complimentary bottle of Maker’s Mark.’
EriktheRed
Newsweek? Definitely.
Harvard? Not just yet. Let’s see what they do about having such a POS hack teaching for them.
raven
Have we talked about the Troublemakers Fest in Tampa? Christine O’Donnell is a headliner.
SatanicPanic
Wingnuts love to extend Obama’s responsibility retroactively to some time in 2006.
The Bobs
@dmsilev: You, me and Krugman. MIT kicks Harvard’s ass over and over. We always derided Harvard as a school for privileged twits, Ferguson fits right in. No legacy admissions at MIT.
f space that
Grover Norquist is a Harvard alum, just sayin’.
The Sailor
@schrodinger’s cat: Because the BBC had first right of refusal?
karen marie
@schrodinger’s cat: You got me. It’s one of the few arguments that actually make the case in favor of defunding PBS.
Mike
I know more about Lord Chatham than this dumb fuck knows about the American political system.
becca
@Professor: I agree.
Today has been a virtual smorgasbord of Ferguson roasted, spat-cocked and filleted.
schrodinger's cat
My theory as to the popularity of Oxbridge educated twits in the US media, BS just sounds better with Received Pronunciation.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
As an alumnus of the better Institute of Technology, I suggest you try picking on someone your own size.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore:
If you need to think that for emotional validation, I’ll not burst your bubble.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore:
Weren’t they winning the Rose Bowl one year?
Tractarian
What happened here is clear; Ferguson knows that Obama took office in January 2009, but chose to compare current job levels with “the January 2008 peak” because it looks worse for Obama that way, period.
As you well know, Doug, there’s no need to make excuses for wingnuts. Especially excuses that assume the good faith and general reasonableness of the wingnut in question. Leave that stuff to Kevin Drum!
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
I was accepted to both, and I have never regretted my choice.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: I didn’t apply to CalTech, mainly for geographic reasons (I grew up on the East coast and wanted to stay roughly in that area). It worked out well enough for me; no regrets.
Fluke bucket
@raven: what in the hell do you think they hope to accomplish? That is funny. I hope the thrilla from Wasilla pops in.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Either one would have been OK with my geographic constraints, i.e. far enough from my parents that they were out of my hair. I visited both schools and got a really bad impression of MIT. A lot of that was probably that the school didn’t show me its best face, but I thought the people I interacted with were jerks, the weather sucked, the campus is butt ugly, the professors in the classes I sat in on weren’t teaching well, and the tendency to give everything numbers instead of names made me wonder if I’d be treated the same way. I’m sure I would have gotten a first-rate education had I gone there, but I don’t think I would have enjoyed it very much. Not that Caltech was a walk in the park, but at least the campus looked a lot more like one than MIT’s.
yopd1
They’ve been using the January 2008 statistics for years. AEI and NRO posted this graph in May which is why Ferguson probably felt good about using the same data.
Emma
@karen marie: The thing is, it flies here. Most of these expats couldn’t get a job at the Daily Birdcage, much less the Torygraph. They’re too far to the right for everyone in the UK except for the really toxic guys.
JenJen
Can we also please deport Tina Brown, DougJ? Thanks muchly!
Joel
@Roger Moore: Well, isn’t your dick just enormous?
That response is obligatory, you realize.
Regnad Kcin
@schrodinger’s cat: Yuck fale
Donut
SFAW
@dmsilev:
I knew there was a reason I like you. Semper pi, man.
@Roger Moore:
I think saying Georgia Tech is better than MIT is a bit of a stretch. But if you’re comparing your alma mater to the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, well, you might have something
dance around in your bones
I lived outside of the U.S. for many years, and I would often solicit contributions of newspapers and magazines from visiting friends.
One of the things I noticed was that over the years Time and Newsweek became thinner and thinner and more content-free.
A far cry from the days when I was a kid and I remember a grownup reading Time and saying a sentence like this was why they loved it:
“It’s like someone invented 5-up and 6-up and then gave up.”
Ok, it struck me as very funny when I was 10.
Nutella
Oxford and Stanford, too. the lying lowlife is employed by all of them. Per Wikipedia:
Besties with Andrew Sullivan as an undergraduate, too.
Right/Left = Impulse/Thoughtfulness
+1 just for the lol headline ;)
On a more serious note:
Newsweek’s at checkout counters all over the country dishonestly trashed the Democratic President for an entire week with their headline using falsehoods that many college undergrads could easily fact check and debunk in under an hour.
While it’s commendable that the intertubes have expanded the circle who know Ferguson is a fraud and a hack, that’s still a very tiny circle compared to the countless more who saw that Newsweek headline attacking Obama.
In a nutshell that’s our media ecosystem: Right-wingers lie blatantly using the megaphones of mass media and then the largely marginalized ‘left’ expend multiple times as much energy correcting the record with only a fraction of the media impact.
rinse, repeat
dance around in your bones
Also, Time and Newsweek have dumbed their writing down to perhaps a 4th grade level..
Not that I have read them in lo, these many years…I gave up after the skinny mags, even if they were free.
Gus
I once had a professor who said something along the lines of “some of what you write will be bullshit, but if you can buttress it with proof from the text, you can still write a good paper.” I think Ferguson thought that this was a good data point, because it supported his argument. Of course my professor would have flunked Ferguson for such piss poor argumentation, but then I did go to a land grant university not Harvard, so what do I know?
Nutella
Ferguson puts a pseudo-intellectual veneer on bog-standard Republic talking points.
He’s now peddling swill about the horrors of public debt. We’re mortgaging our children’s future!
He gave speeches in 2000 where he rather patronizingly explained to us peons how good public debt is and how silly and unserious anyone was who complained about the Bush tax cuts, etc. contributing to the deficit.
Just like Ryan, he pushed deficits as a great economic strategy when they were Bush deficits and now shrieks about how awful those same deficits are when he can blame them on Obama.