Like "whorehouse morals," the term "celebrity historian" is one of those oxymoronic expressions that should be viewed with instant distrust. So it is with Niall Ferguson, the Harvard professor and fellow at Oxford and Stanford's Hoover Institute. Long a fixture on American television screens (including on taxpayer-funded PBS), the hyper-partisan Ferguson has among other things claimed that the British empire was a "good thing" for its colonial subjects, that the UK should have stayed out of World War I, and, most recently, that its "six killer apps" helped the West, until recently, dominate "Civilization" for 500 years.
But writing actual history and doing tedious economic analysis generally won't make you a rock star. For that, as his recent slander of John Maynard Keynes shows, Ferguson has turned to six new killer apps of his own.
1. Casual Bigotry. Carrying the austerity banner into battle against Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman has not been a happy experience for Ferguson. So, Ferguson turned to gay-bashing instead:

Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes' famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of "poetry" rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.

So offensive, in fact, that Niall Ferguson issued "An Unqualified Apology." Informing readers that "as those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise," Ferguson explained that:

I should not have suggested - in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation - that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes's wife Lydia miscarried.

Ferguson, the former McCain adviser and Romney cheerleader who supposedly detests all prejudice, also apparently forgot that he said this about President Obama in 2009.

President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the U.S.

2. Hypocrisy. Niall Ferguson may care about future generations of children and grandchildren. But given his own family life, Ferguson probably should not have thrown that boomerang at John Maynard Keynes. As New York Magazine reported three years ago in "Niall Ferguson Leaves Wife for Somali Intellectual":

Historian and noted Krugman baiter Niall Ferguson has left his wife of sixteen years, former newspaper editor Susan Douglas, with whom he has three kids, for another woman. This sounds bad, but after perusing the situation, we have to say we kind of understand his decision. Why? The woman in question, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is pretty spectacular. She's smart: A Somali-born, Dutch-educated lawyer and former MP, she's the author of a memoir, Infidel, a fellow at a conservative think tank, and was voted one of Time's most influential people in 2005 (in fact, that is when they met, right). She is also completely hot, and has a giant tattoo of passages from the Koran on her back.

Apparently, George Costanza was wrong. Fatwa sex trumps conjugal visit sex.
3. Counterfactuals, Not the Facts. Most historians see things as they are and ask "why?" In contrast, Niall Ferguson sees things that never were and asks "why not?"
Counterfactual history isn't just more fun than the real thing. It's more profitable, too, as evidenced by his 1997 book, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. But you don't have to wade through that tome to play along with Ferguson's historical what-ifs. You can find often them on the op-ed page, where you can learn lessons like Ghana would be have been better off if it never became independent. And when he wasn't pining for "the good old days of colonialism," Professor Ferguson was warning how much worse things would be "if 9/11 had never happened":

If things had happened differently 10 years ago--if there had been no 9/11 and no retaliatory invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq--we might be living through an Islamist Winter rather than an Arab Spring.
Replaying the history game without 9/11 suggests that, ironically, the real impact of the attacks was not on Americans but on the homelands of the attackers themselves.

4. Persistence in the Face of Error. If Pope Francis ever has any questions on the doctrine of papal infallibility, he can just ring up Niall Ferguson. Apparently, being a right-wing ideologue repeatedly proven wrong means never having to say you're sorry.
Exhibit A in Ferguson's reign of error is his August 2012 Newsweek cover story, "Why Barack Obama Needs to Go." That piece was so nakedly partisan, so sloppy and so riddled through with errors that it kept fact checkers busy around the clock.
But Ferguson's small government propaganda hardly ends there. He didn't merely claim in May 2009 that the U.S. government's "tidal wave of debt issuance" would cause U.S. interest rates to soar. He raised to 11th Commandment status the now debunked 2010 Reinhart-Rogoff paper on austerity and economic growth:

"I would urge him to read my good friend Ken Rogoff's paper published in January which makes the point that once debt-to-GDP passes the 90 percent level, then you will see a decline in growth...The 'law of finance' says that once you get a debt-to-GDP ratio much above 90 percent, it has implications for yields on government bonds."

Repeatedly taken to task by Paul Krugman and others, Ferguson naturally went on the attack:

In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is--though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Neither acknowledging nor apologizing for his mistakes, Niall Ferguson is like Andrew Breitbart with a larger vocabulary and a better circulatory system.
5. Blood Lust. For a man who fancies himself the heir to Adam Smith, Niall Ferguson is awfully casual when it comes to war and bloodshed. Paraphrasing Joseph Schumpeter, Ferguson in February 2012 ridiculed those (like the U.S. Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretaries) warning of the dangers of a preventive war against Iran by calling for just that:

The single biggest danger in the Middle East today is not the risk of a six-day Israeli war against Iran. It is the risk that Western wishful nonthinking allows the mullahs of Tehran to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because I am in no doubt that they would take full advantage of such a lethal lever. We would have acquiesced in the creation of an empire of extortion.
War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement. The people who don't yet know that are the ones still in denial about what a nuclear-armed Iran would end up costing us all.
It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.

Nevertheless, in October 2012 Ferguson warned readers that a desperate Barack Obama might announce a deal with Iran--or better yet, attack Iran--in an October surprise designed to win reelection:

Of course, it may now be too late to wag the dog. It may, after all, come down to the dirty old ground game I wrote about in last week's column--the bare-knuckle fight to win the vital votes in the vital states. But never underestimate the ruthlessness of the Chicago machine that has been the key to Barack Obama's rise. With his fall suddenly a real possibility, the only thing that would really surprise me would be no October--or November--surprise.

Imagine how surprised Niall Ferguson must have been when none of his scenarios came to pass and Mitt Romney got his ass handed to him on Election Day anyway.
6. Branding. Only Thomas Friedman among the frequently-wrong-but-never-embarrassed commentariat markets himself more completely than Niall Ferguson. But with his trademarked terms and catchphrases, Ferguson is a close second. For example, "Chimerica" isn't a mythical creature but Ferguson's term to describe the symbiotic Chinese-American relationship that dominates the global economy. In Civilization, Ferguson's "six killer apps" (competition, science, property, modern medicine, consumerism, work ethic) explain the rise of the West and its five centuries of worldwide superiority.
There's no need for Niall Ferguson to stop there. As just the latest UK import to trying to distort American politics through his blinkered commentary, Ferguson is an eminent Carpetdouchebagger™. He could also be considered a pioneer of Narcinomics™, the emerging field of self-glorification through ersatz economic analysis. Sadly, there's already a word for the nexus of pseudo-history, fantasy and fun with numbers where Niall Ferguson makes his living.
Fiction.