The cover of Newsweek’s current edition (August 27) features a picture of Obama walking away with his jacket slung over his shoulder. The caption: “Hit the Road, Barack.” It’s getting a lot of play, the sort of provocative teaser that sells magazines, and it’s a stellar example of tabloid journalism befitting FOX News.

Recall that Time magazine recently sacked (or at least suspended) its editor-at-large Fareed Zakaria for alleged plagiarism (Zakaria has admitted to having made a terrible “mistake”). Recall also that Zakaria was Newsweek’s featured scholar-journalist until 2010 when he left for greener pastures at Time.

I mention Zakaria because Newsweek's choice to write the “Obama’s Gotta Go” piece is a rabid right-wing Scottish refugee from the robed ranks of Oxbridge named Niall Ferguson. Zakaria is reflective, fair-minded, and brilliant. Ferguson is the anti-Zakaria.

Ferguson comes across as an arrogant, glib, grandstanding windbag with a talent for camouflaging the most outlandish falsehoods, inaccuracies, and half-truths behind a façade of erudition.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is Niall Ferguson, in his own words, talking about…Niall Ferguson: “I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win.”

That’s right: “…fired up by the rise of Ryan.” And here’s what Ferguson, with his usual scholarly objectivity says about Paul Ryan. “There is literally no one in Washington who understands the challenges of fiscal reform better.”

Oh, that’s not the half of it. Here’s Ferguson’s rapturous description of his first messianic encounter with Ryan:

"I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since."

Now there’s some real “fair and balanced” scholarly commentary. Thank you Newsweek. The nation needs a good laugh now more than ever. (Hasn’t anybody ever pointed out to Ferguson that Ryan is not heading the ticket and that vice-presidents in the United States are likely to be irrelevant unless the incoming president happens to be as clueless as George W. Bush was?)

Ferguson tells us, “the question confronting the country...is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.”

Whether the promises were “to create new jobs” or “to lay a new foundation for growth”; or to ‘build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together”; or to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost”; or to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age” – “the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.”

Pitiful. Of course, the wingnut Republican wrecking crew had nothing to do with these failures. Nothing.

Ferguson’s reservoir of gall is seemingly bottomless. Here’s what he has to say about taxes:

"Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits."

No mention of the fact that the lucky ones in the bottom half don’t make enough money to pay taxes. Or that the top 1% pay on average about what Mitt Romney pays – a whopping 13%. Or that while the top corporate tax rate is 35%, the average tax rate mega-companies in America pay is around 12%.

But for the Bush tax cuts and the loopholes for corporations and the super rich (check out “carried interest” if you want to be dazzled by self-dealing hedge fund managers and venture capitalists), the federal budget would have a tidy trillion dollars for deficit reduction. Oops, no mention of that either. Instead, here’s what Ferguson writes about the deficit:

"And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year…"

No mention of anything but the cost of Obama’s health care reform, Medicare, and Social Security. No mention of the hundreds of billions in wasteful defense spending designed less to protect us from real or imagined enemies than to keep members of Congress (all of whom have military installations and defense contractors in their home districts) in office indefinitely.

There’s a lot more trash to trash in this piece of trash, but please read it and see for yourself just how far the standards of journalism have fallen in our time. Ironically, Ferguson is right for all the wrong reasons. Obama doesn’t deserve a second term. He failed to deal with the new breed of radical Republicans in Congress. But WE don’t deserve a Romney-Ryan first term nor can what's left of our crippled republic survive it.

And one more thing: Niall Ferguson’s gotta go.