The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events, then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.
— Otto von Bismarck, quoted in Newsweek
By Joel Thurtell
Niall Ferguson, the man Newsweek described in its February 21, 2011 issue as its “new columnist on Obama’s Egypt debacle and the vacuum it exposes,” reminded me of Norman Mailer in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” trying to excuse his absence from the street action during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
On its cover, Newsweek used a bright white background with Obama gazing downward and a huge headline that reads, “Egypt: How Oblama Blew It.”
The layout intended for us to think that the downward-looking Obama reflected a man who didn’t, as Bismarck put it, “hear God’s footsteps.”
Curious to learn just how badly the president screwed up, I started reading the Ferguson piece, which sets itself up with the quotation from the Iron Chancellor that is so vague and so obviously referring to other-century matters that it could be twisted in any direction a devious writer might want.
The column, headed in red and black letters, “WANTED: A GRAND STRATEGY FOR AMERICA,” coasts along for five long paragraphs on a 19th-century Prussian’s coat tails until Ferguson makes this coy admission:
“Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference.”
Oh, wow!
The annual Herzliya security conference!
Man, that must be a really big deal for this Newsweek columnist to get to attend.
So big a deal that, like Mailer in Chicago, he abandoned the scene of action and flew to a place where history was not happening.
To a place where 140 journalists were not getting bashed.
Oh, there was talk, I’m sure, at this Herzliya security conference.
Lots of bloviating by unnamed people unhappy with Obama’s handling of Egypt.
And Ferguson gives us an earful about how these unnamed people are displeased with Obama for this and that.
What Newsweek printed from its “new columnist” is a hollow pronouncement by a long-dead German and an admission, underlined by braggadocio, that he got out of the place where things were happening and hung out in a place where people were slinging bullshit.
Hell of a reporter.
What we have is an amazing example of journalistic chutzpah.
He’s a reporter, and he missed the big story.
What does he do?
Why, he makes the other reporters out to be chumps.
These are the reporters who stayed in Cairo to report events unfolding, and maybe get beat up.
The other reporters “hyperventilate”?
What should we call what Ferguson is doing?
How about “absentee journalism?”
