There’s nothing like a scrap between two seasoned brawlers to liven up a Monday in the dog days of August. In the red corner, Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and conservative bomb-thrower in residence at the Daily Beast/Newsweek. In the blue corner, Paul Robin Krugman, Nobel-winning economist, Princeton prof, and designated liberal curmudgeon at the Times.

As fans of political sparring will recall, these two have mixed it up before—numerous times, in fact, mainly over the Obama stimulus. The cause of their latest spat: a characteristically overstated Newsweek cover story by Ferguson arguing that it’s time to replace Obama. (Headline: “Hit the Road Barack: Why We Need a New President.”) Krugman, who has been spending the last few weeks hiking through some pretty-looking hills, interrupted his vacation to accuse his old nemesis of misrepresenting the facts in claiming that Obamacare will add more than a trillion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years.

Nothing very surprising there, you might say. Ferguson, a prolific author whose “end is nigh” worldview makes him a popular speaker on the hedge-fund/Davos circuit, has been railing away at the Obama Administration since 2009, warning that its profligate spending policies were sending the U.S.A. the way of Greece. The equally indefatigable Krugman has been lecturing Ferguson for almost as long about his ignorance of elementary (Keynesian) economics and the bond market. (If people in the markets truly believed Ferguson’s analysis, the U.S. government would never be able to issue ten-year bonds with a yield of well under two per cent.)

What is pretty remarkable about the latest dustup is the weakness of the arguments presented by Ferguson, a streetwise public intellectual who, according to his Web site, now holds positions at four different élite academic institutions. If called upon three months before an election to pen a provocative cover story in a national newsmagazine clamoring for the President to be chucked out, most writers would make every effort to avoid giving the other side easy opportunities to tear down their arguments. And yet, here comes Ferguson blatantly twisting a report from the Congressional Budget Office and presenting numerous other distortions and half-truths that anybody with access to Google could discredit in a few hours.

It all got me pondering anew a question that’s been been on my mind every day since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate: Where are the real conservative intellectuals these days? Surely there must be some, but sometimes it seems like all the right has to offer is a soap-box mountebank like Ryan, a trio of embittered Supreme Court Justices, and a few gnarled old Washington fixtures like Bill Kristol, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer. Given this vacuum, it’s relatively easy for an energetic and disputatious blow-in like Ferguson to emerge as one of Obama’s most visible, if not exactly persuasive, critics.

The immediate bone of contention is the fiscal impact of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. On this, I have some sympathy for Ferguson’s argument that it is likely to be substantial. Providing tens of millions of uninsured Americans hefty subsidies to buy private insurance will surely be an expensive business. The history of other entitlement programs, such as Medicare, suggests initial cost estimates often prove overoptimistic, and that could well prove to be true here. But rather than making this argument, Ferguson took another tack, implying that the official actuaries had already said the reforms would add substantially to the deficit. He wrote,

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.

Actually, that’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. In addition to providing subsidies for the uninsured, the A.C.A. included tax increases on premium insurance plans, the imposition of certain user fees, and significant cuts in Medicare spending. As Krugman rightly pointed out, when the scorers from the C.B.O./Joint Committee took these changes into account, they concluded that the A.C.A. would actually reduce the deficit slightly rather than adding to it. You don’t have to look very hard at the C.B.O./Joint Committee report (pdf) to see the relevant numbers. They are right there in Table 1 on page 2: over the period from 2012 to 2022, the A.C.A. would reduce the deficit by $210 billion.

Ferguson omitted any mention of this figure. Upon being challenged, he posted a rebuttal on the Daily Beast in which he tried to bluff his way through, calling Krugman’s objection “truly feeble,” and adding: “I very deliberately said ‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,’ not ‘the ACA.’ There is a big difference.” There surely is—not that the readers of the Newsweek cover story would know that.

In assailing Krugman, though, Ferguson committed another no-no for journalists and historians: selectively editing a quotation to support his argument. In assessing the financial consequences of Obamacare, a lot depends on whether you believe it will succeed in slowing the annual growth of spending on Medicare from about four per cent, the average rate during the past two decades, to two per cent. Ferguson is skeptical. As it happens, so am I. But he didn’t just say that. Instead, he cited a passage about the Medicare cost cuts from the C.B.O./J.C.T. report, and ended with this quote: “It is unclear whether such a reduction can be achieved…”, thereby implying that the official bean counters had cost doubt on whether the economies would ever materialize.

But note the ellipsis at the end of the quote. Enter Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Politico, with a post entitled “Niall Ferguson’s ridiculous defense.” Byers called up the C.B.O. report and looked up what Ferguson had left out. Here is the sentence in full: