Andrew Ferguson Continues to Excel at Fool-Spotting

One of my favorite books of political essays is Fools Names, Fools Faces, by Andrew Ferguson (which I hope to highlight in an upcoming Thursday book-review post). Mr. Ferguson’s breezy, ironic style is on full display in this Weekly Standard article from June of this year, as he tackles Newsweek magazine and its editor, Jon Meacham, as well as the self-congratulatory liberal press, in general. A couple of pearls from the article:

Everybody is crazy about Jon or at least is hoping not to get fired by him. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that everybody has his favorite "Meachamism," a word I just made up to describe a statement so comically banal or transparently untrue that only a man whom everybody is crazy about or hopes not to get fired by would try to put it into print. My own favorite Meachamism is rather obscure. It pops up in a book that nobody has read, even though it's about a president, George H.W. Bush, that everybody pretended to kind of admire once we got a good look at his son. The book is called My Father, My President, by Doro Bush. On page 218, Doro prints this quotation from Jon: "An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias."

* * * *

Monday wasn't even over yet before everybody found out that Maureen Dowd, who as everyone knows writes a column for the New York Times, had lifted a paragraph from a popular blog and put it into her column and passed it off as her own work…Her explanation was implausible in every particular, compounding her original offense. Normally everybody loves it when this happens, because everybody gets to say to one another, "In Washington the cover up is often worse than the crime!" But this was Maureen. The unthinkable began to emerge as the implausibility sunk in. Everybody's favorite was not only lazy and unimaginative but dishonest too--a bit of a fraud. Just in time the "media critic" for the Washington Post stepped in to deliver summary judgment. Maureen, he announced, had made an "inadvertent mistake." Relieved, everybody went back to loving Maureen and wanting to be loved by her.

One of my favorite Meachamisms – I am employing the term somewhat loosely, but still, I think, appropriately, because, although Meacham might not have coined the descriptive phrase, he permitted it to appear on the cover of his magazine – is the title of a cover story in a recent edition of Newsweek that referred to Al Gore as “The thinking man’s thinking man”. Complementing the verbal Meachamism, the cover featured a visual aid in the form of a photo of Al. The photo is cunningly cropped to display Al’s face from the nose up; no flash of teeth to distract us from admiring that awesome forehead, behind which, we are doubtless intended to believe, even newer and more brilliant thoughts are crackling, like Jiffy-Pop popcorn within its expanding tin-foil globe. And there’s an apple over his head, the juxtaposition of man and fruit proclaiming, with a particularly ham-fisted – or perhaps ham-brained – lack of subtlety, the official Newsweek position that Al is our very own Isaac Newton.

(A floor-sweeping doff of my cavalier’s hat to Ed Driscoll).