EVENTUALLY, LEFTY POLITICS CORRUPT EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH: Corrupting the National Book Award? “Democracy in Chains has been testing the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity. There has been an explosion of documentation that MacLean gets facts wrong, misunderstands her sources, and invents quotations or pulls them out of context to mean the opposite of what they said. You can find all this easily if you just google the book’s title. It is hard to avoid the inference that the book’s defects are outweighed, in the committee’s judgment, by the book’s eloquent denunciation of the Kochs. . . . MacLean’s central historical claim is false. That claim is that the economist James Buchanan devised the “master plan” (xviii) by which the Koch brothers are now subverting democracy. Buchanan devised no master plan, and there’s no evidence that the Kochs’ political actions were influenced by anything he wrote.”

It’s the comparison with disgraced fraud Michael Bellesiles, though, that hits hardest. Bellesiles also presented desired fiction masquerading as history, and won a prestigious award (the Bancroft Prize) before his falsehoods were exposed. (Via Jonathan Adler.)