Hack List

One great end of the year tradition is the Salon Hack List. This year’s winner—-Mark Halperin! He must be so honored. Jennifer Rubin won the well-deserved silver and Bernard Henri-Levy the bronze. The BHL entry was particularly enjoyable:

He’s prospered in intellectual circles despite his tragic inability to button a shirt in part because he’s a successful businessman, born into wealth and friends with the French corporate elite. He writes with the self-assuredness of someone quite convinced of his brilliance, and that self-assurance perhaps explains why he so regularly makes shit up and gets shit wrong.

Like, for example, claiming that Himmler, who killed himself, stood trial at Nuremberg. And citing a well-known fake satirical philosopher in a book.

For a taste of the sort of hackneyed, half-assed work he produces on the major issues of the day, try this item on the eurozone crisis. It’s the sort of inane nonsense that gives claptrap a bad name. BHL noticed that the crisis involved Greece and Italy and that made him excited because he could then write about how civilization was invented in those places. To understand the European debt crisis, apparently, “we should be rereading Gibbon, Humboldt, or even Polybius — these theoreticians of the fate and the fall of the Athenian paradigm or the Roman road — rather than Friedman or Keynes.” Actually I think in this particular instance Friedman or Keynes would be a bit more helpful?

The real challenge of this list must be holding it to only 20.