Where Are The Conservative Intellectuals?

This article reviews a debate between Niall Ferguson, who published an article in Newsweek making false claims about the Obama healthcare plan, and Paul Krugman who corrected his mistakes.  There were a lot of good issues that could have been raised about the budget implications of Obama's healthcare plan.  Those issues were ignored.  Instead Ferguson misquoted a report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to support his criticism of Obama's healthcare plan.  His misrepresentations of the CBO report have been widely criticized in the media.  He has been made to look like a fool.  That caused John Cassidy, who wrote this article, to question the intellectual quality of prominent conservatives.  The current crew does not compare well with its predecessors.  They have no new ideas.  They rely upon worn out ideas about free markets, and they depend upon misrepresenting facts. Our political debates would be more useful if they were between more capable, and intellectually honest conservatives who had their facts right, and their opponents on the left.