It's getting to be a habit with Ron

Yet another round of of Priesthood v. Apostasy, and Brad DeLong is reliably on the side of the Inquisition, though oddly he's on the side of Front Page's David Horowitz too;

Rather than responding to Ronald Radosh’s Frontpage review of American Betrayal, as a reasonable author might, Diana West has launched a series of personal attacks not only on Radosh but on the editors of Frontpage, calling us “hypocrites,” “totalitarians,” “ossified totalitarians,” commissars” and liars (“If Frontpage Will Lie about This, What Won’t They Lie About?”) and claiming we “suppressed” — also “purged” – a favorable review of her book because its opinions were “incorrect,” clearly implying that they were politically incorrect. ....Readers of American Betrayal will find this kind of paranoid fantasy all too familiar.

Though, in this case, the paranoids have real enemies;

I am solely responsible for the decision to remove the positive review of her book that originally appeared on Frontpage on which she builds her anti-Frontpage case.

Which would seem to be, on its face, good reason for Ms West to be upset! Nor is Horowitz helping himself with the further specifics;

Here is what happened. When the Frontpage review of American Betrayal appeared I received an email from Ron Radosh whom I have known for more than sixty years, and whose work as a historian is respected not only by me but by every conservative academic historian with whom I am familiar. Radosh is a pioneer in documenting the guilt of the Rosenbergs, in analyzing the Amerasia spy case, in dissecting the Communist infiltration of Hollywood, and in being one of a small group of conservative historians who have resisted the minimizing of the Communist threat by progressives and the whitewashing of traitors like Alger Hiss. 

So, Horowitz's buddy had his nose out of joint, and David catered to his fit of pique. How could have Diana West  overlooked this perfectly reasonable explanation? No political correctness here at all. Just see how sweetly reasonable er, rigorously logical Radosh was being (from the e-mail of Radosh):

“It amounts to a Birch Society type conspiracy history theory of Communism and the Cold War, with half truths built to unwarranted conclusions, a failure to comprehend history in context, as well as great errors of fact that undermine her thesis.

“For one thing Harry Hopkins was NOT Agent 19 [as West claims]. That was Larry Duggan. It makes a big difference.

“She misuses Klehr and Haynes throughout the book, and when they actually draw opposite conclusions than she does, based on evidence, she simply says they are wrong without bothering to prove her point. This is not a difference of opinion; it is a failure to use evidence correctly in order to spin her conspiracy theories….

This is as important an issue. Do we really want conservatives to rewrite history based on an ideological view, while ignoring context, evidence and reality? That is what she does.” (emphasis added)

(The woman is disagreeing with my friends and my interpretations of the evidence, I tell you.this can't be tolerated!

(Start accumulating the kindling, meanwhile, take down the review that sided with her apostasy. I'll get back to you.)

Which Radosh did to the tune of over 7,000 words. Which has to be read in all its self-absorbed glory to be believed. It's a self-parody; the Appeal to One's Own Authority. Unfortunately titled, McCarthy on Steroids.

Unfortunately, we say, because this isn't the first time Ronald Radosh has pulled this stunt. The last time he did, circa 2008, it was a self-promoting 'review' of M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History (which the editors at National Review Online seem to have been sufficiently embarrassed by that they--he who lives by suppressing reviews...--have removed from their website). Which managed to even charge Evans with plagiarism.

That was not going to stand for long, with a guy like Stan Evans, and Ann Coulter allowed him to use her column space to set the record straight;

Radosh writes, “Evans tries hard to make it appear the [Amerasia] cover-up [of John Stewart Service's espionage] was something he discovered.” (No evidence is presented for this snide assertion, nor could it be, for none exists.) Even worse, in referring to a book he and Prof. Harvey Klehr published on the Amerasia case in 1996, Radosh parenthetically says this was “a book from which Evans takes virtually all of his material and which he does not acknowledge.” This vicious statement is an astounding, and outrageous, lie. My documentation of the Amerasia fix, cover-up, grand-jury rigging, wiretapping, and so on is derived from the files of the FBI here in Washington, several thousand pages of which I have in my possession, accumulated over a span of years. It owes nothing to the Klehr-Radosh book, as may readily be seen by scanning my end-notes and comparing these to their annotations, which are based on an entirely different indexing system, so that one isn’t transposable to the other. 

.... I derived none of my FBI documentation from it, provide material that isn’t featured in it, and conversely don’t cover matters that it covers because my materials differed in form and content from those collected at Emory University, which has its own archive of FBI files pertaining to Amerasia, a main source of the Klehr-Radosh data. 

And it isn't standing with Diana West either, as she's now having some similar fun with Radosh's bizarre idea that he can get away with claiming that her book contains anecdotes that it does not;

For example, Radosh writes: “Instead of weighing these fears, West turns to another anecdote telling how George Elsey found confidential files in the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front in 1942.”

There’s one problem with Radosh’s scholarship here. This anecdote about George Elsey, confidential files and the Map Room isn’t in my book. Anywhere. ….Radosh wrote a retort headlined: “Diana West’s Attempt to Respond.” ….

In his retort, Radosh writes: “Maybe she couldn’t find the anecdote. But it is there in three different places where she writes how FDR told Hopkins to go into Molotov’s bedroom while he was staying in the White House so that he could meet with the President, and at that meeting, Hopkins told Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front.”

Now we have another problem. The brand new anecdote isn’t in my book, either.

Well, what does that matter to a historian?

Finally, David Horowitz isn't much of a logician either, as he chimes in on the 'second front' (FDR's attempt to convince Churchill that an immediate cross channel invasion of France--in 1942--was needed to relieve the pressure on Stalin in the east) mentioned above, with;

If, as she claims, the Kremlin determined the strategy of D-Day--the opening of a second front in 1944 in France--why was Stalin unable to get a second front opened in 1942...[?]

Gee, David, maybe because the Allies didn't have the resources in 1942 that they did in 1944. Or, rather than take our word for it, you might see what Winston Churchill had to say about it in his WWII volume (The Hinge of Fate, Chapter XVIII). He reproduces the conversation he had with Harry Hopkins and George C. Marshall in the Spring of 1942 when they proposed the idea to him. It's a classic political response.