Let’s start with the fact that he tried to get Paul Ryan to run for president, as the Times reports [emphasis added]:

…that evening [in 2011], none drew more attention than a relatively new member of that best-of class: Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and now Mitt Romney’s running mate, who spoke passionately about the threat posed by the national debt and the radical actions needed to rein it in.

“I thought, ‘This is the one guy in Washington paying attention,’ ” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economic historian and commentator, who spent some of the rest of that evening, along with Mr. Kristol, trying to persuade Mr. Ryan to run for president.

First, when does he find time to teach? Second, stop kissing ass. (“This is the one guy in Washington…” Gag.)

Third, there is a particular form of British arrogance that manifests itself in a Brit deciding who should run for the presidency of the United States which is particularly irritating when that Brit is making stupid choices but everyone takes him intellectually seriously because of his accent and Americans’ intellectual inferiority complex regarding Great Britain despite the fact that that particular Brit has already declared that American intellectual life is more rigorous than that of England.

Whew.

So then Ferguson goes and writes this incredibly dishonest anti-Obama article for Newsweek (oh, Tina, would you just stop?), in which he distorts a fact that even I know, and I don’t particularly pay attention to the health care debate.

The dek reads:

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

Hmmm. Professor Ferguson, so far as I can discover, you can’t actually vote here. So that would be “your” only hope. But more important, you’re wrong. (Just as you were when you served as an advisor to John McCain.)

Paul Krugman quickly pointed out that Ferguson is either wrong or deliberately misleading when he argues that Obamacare will add $1.2 trillion to the deficit. Krugman points out that the Congressional Budget Office, cited as proof by Ferguson, says basically the opposite of what Ferguson claims it says.

Ferguson…is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

In the Atlantic, James Fallows responds to Ferguson’s article with a post headlined, “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize,” explaining:

A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade.

Fallows’ evisceration of Ferguson is wonderfully entertaining, but sort of dismaying too, because it makes it sound that Harvard has granted tenure to an idiot or a cheat.

Fallows also notes that he once clashed with Ferguson after Ferguson compared Obama to Felix the Cat, writing, “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.”

Fallows is cautious about calling this racism, but I will—it’s that sort of casual British racism in which it’s all just a joke, and what are you getting so upset about, don’t you have a sense of humor?

Ferguson defends himself against the charges of intellectual dishonesty in his Newsweek essay, but his defense itself is, according to Dylan Beyers in Politico, “ridiculous, misleading, [and] ethically questionable.” Business Insider calls Ferguson’s self-defense “embarrassing.”

So first he’s either wrong or deliberately misleading; then, when that’s pointed out, Ferguson deliberately misleads again.

I guess Ferguson’s bored at Harvard—not that he’s around much anyway—and wants a job in Washington. (He is, after all, teaching a course on that great statesman, Henry Kissinger.) But does he have to resort to intellectual duplicity to get one?