While Newsweek has certainly produced some penetrating reportage and incisive analysis, the opposite has more often been true in this presidential race, as Jim Geraghty reminds us. Newsweek's latest pro-Obama work is this hit job on Joe Lieberman. The writers report that during a confrontation between Obama and Lieberman on the floor of the Senate last week, "Obama told Lieberman he was surprised by Lieberman's personal attacks and his half-hearted denials of the false rumors that Obama is a Muslim." This claim was sourced to an anonymous Obama aide, and as Mark Hemingway reports, Newsweek never contacted Lieberman's office for a response to this accusation:

Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittmann says, “The anonymous Obama campaign staffer’s characterization of the private conversation was entirely false and fabricated.” Another Lieberman aide confirmed, “I was not told that the Obama campaign was selectively leaking the contents of that conversation, or I would have made it clear that that characterization was completely and utterly false. The first time I knew what the Obama campaign was saying was when I saw it in a magazine.” That Newsweek did not ask Lieberman to respond to the specific charges is grossly unfair.

Newsweek never cites an example of Lieberman's "half-hearted denials" of the "Obama's a Muslim" rumor. And what makes the story all the more infuriating is that it seems, at least to me, that Obama's confrontation with Lieberman was a perfect example of the Clintonian triangulation he's supposed to be above. After pivoting away from his dovish positions on Iran in a speech to AIPAC, Obama then walks onto the floor of the Senate and tells Senator Joe Lieberman to shut up--a not-so-subtle appeal to the Kossack Left.