They wrote that "the recession is over!" once economic indicators suggested that MAYBE we have hit bottom. They were rightly mocked.
They wondered aloud whether the death of Baitullah Mehsud meant the end of Al-Qaeda. Note that Al Qaeda existed long before Mehsud founded the Pakistani Taliban and that while Mehsud was an important ally, he's not even a member of Al-Qaeda. Newsweek escaped mockery for that.
Now they wonder if Quentin Tarantino had made NAZIs out of Jews in his new film "Inglorious Basterds" in a piece titled "Taratino Rewrites the Holocaust." I kid you not.
The people at Newsweek are beginning to demonstrate another reason for the collapse of print. The so-called educated aren't always so well educated, and are sometimes just downright sensationalist and utterly ridiculous.
Oh, and before I get into the Newsweek hit job on Tarantino, let me hit back at Newsweek.
In Inglourious Basterds (the dimwitted misspelling is never explained),
Speaking of dim-wits! By the way, it's common knowledge that they used the "dimwitted spelling" because of the censors and rating system. Dim wits, indeed. Of course, the dimwittacy(I made that word up)
Newsweek fished for some old quotes of Tarantino and, without any real reason, brought up a time when he joked about what he would do if a 12 year old broke into his house. Hint; it involves emptying a gun. What that has to do with revenge is beyond me.
In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by—well, by turning Jews into Nazis. In history, Jews were repeatedly herded into buildings and burned alive (a barbarism on which the plot of another recent film, The Reader, hangs); in Inglourious Basterds, it's the Jews who orchestrate this horror.
Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure.
I'm glad we know so much more now about Newsweek author Daniel Mendelsohn's perspective.