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ONE LAST SHOT….I won’t pretend to know why Newsweek chose to turn over 3,000 words (!) to professional liberal Obama hater Sean Wilentz in their current issue (his opening claim that “I would like to see him succeed in fulfilling his promise” is one of the more transparent howlers I’ve seen recently), but it really has to be seen to be believed. Be sure to especially check out the second-to-last paragraph:

Liberal intellectuals actually could have aided their candidate, while also doing their professional duty, by pressing him on his patently evasive accounts about various matters, such as his connections with the convicted wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko, or his more-than-informal ties to the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, including their years of association overseeing an expensive, high-profile, but fruitless public-school reform effort in Chicago. Instead, the intellectuals have failed Obama as well as their readers by branding such questioning as irrelevant, malicious or heretical.

Um, sure. That would have been a great way to help out Obama. Should liberal intellectuals also have viciously attacked his wife just to toughen him up for November? Questioned whether he was really the father of his children? Dug more deeply into his Muslim heritage?

If Newsweek wants to publish stuff like this under Karl Rove’s byline, whatever. At least everyone knows what axe is being ground. But how many of Newsweek’s readers know that Wilentz was a one-man hurricane of pro-Hillary/anti-Obama agit-prop for months and months during the primary? Not many, I’d guess, and they might read this bitter diatribe a little differently if they did.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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