Tim Fernholz of the American Prospect wrote me an email complaining about an item I wrote yesterday, which questioned the motives of those attacking Matt Taibbi’s piece on Obama in Rolling Stone. The critics (including Fernholz), I wrote, “seem to either not like him [Taibbi] personally or perhaps they just can’t bring themselves to face what’s obvious by now, namely that if you’re a liberal Democrat, the Obama years are going to be a huge disappointment.”

Fernholz wrote to say: “You don’t need to do any amateur psychology to divine my motives for writing about this story: It’s not because of some personal beef I have with Taibbi, who I don’t know and whose previous work I’ve enjoyed, or some special affection I have for the Obama administration (if you bother to read my work, especially on economic policy, much of it is criticism of the administration). The reason I’m criticizing Taibbi’s story is because I think the story is wrong. Is that so hard to understand?”

Fair enough. But I still think that much of the criticism of the Taibbi piece is off base. You decide.

Here’s a piece by Felix Salmon taking on Fernholz.

And here’s Fernholz’s reply.