Oh, About that Newsweek Cover

Newsweek ponders the intelligence of President Obama’s critics:

On the other hand, unlike Newsweek, they actually know he is the president. Recall this classic Newsweek gaffe from 2010:

Unlike Newsweek, they’re also more likely to display a healthy skepticism towards statist hacks such as Al Gore…

…and Joe Biden:

And also unlike Newsweek, they also believe in intellectual diversity:

Though unlike Andrew Sullivan, they’re probably not debating who’s more conservative — John Kerry or Barack Obama? (Or Ron Paul, for that matter.)

Like Ann Althouse, in her initial take on Newsweek’s cover, I haven’t bothered to read Andrew’s actual article, but all I can say is, based on the cover that was created to promote it, why does he want to belittle his editor Tina Brown, so? Journalism’s first rule of interoffice relations is “don’t **** where you eat,” (I’ll let you fill-in whatever four letter euphemism you prefer in the asterisks), and by painting with such a broad brush, Andrew, or his headline writer, has certainly blown past that.

Actually, that’s not all I can say — I was reluctant to mention the Newsweek cover, since Newsweek ran it for one reason only. In their last days as a magazine owned by the Washington Post, they openly came out hard left. After the Post unloaded the paper for a buck, the Tina Brown/Jane Harman version of the magazine hasn’t exactly altered that perception. So they’re adopting the strategy that Hollywood ran with after the 2004 election: attempt to work their Red State non-audiences into a lather in the hopes of generating publicity for their far left projects. And of course, attempting to get rival camps playing off each other has long been the M.O. of Politico as well.

I’m not sure what it says about the right’s election chances this year; though if past performance is any indication, we saw an accelerating number of “Why Does America Suck?” stories in the fall of 2010, when it was obvious that the MSM had lost their side of the aisle in at least one house of Congress.

Hollywood has been surprised in the past when conservatives have ignored their more outré fare; I think that would have been the better strategy here as well, but once Power Line, Hot Air and Instapundit all piled on, too late for that.

Besides, to paraphrase a riff Jonah Goldberg used to describe RatherGate back in 2004, Newsweek cover this week is like a pinata — you can whack it from any angle, and all sorts of gifts fall out.

QED.