[Pharmboy]

This guy just won't go away.

Thank God for the Wall Street Journal: not afraid to call a liar a liar and laugh at him at the same time.

[Pharmboy]

Bang.

[cripplecreek]

You dont suppose global warming caused the flood that stripped him of his notes and research?

[G.Mason]

Not being a genius myself, this may be presumptuous on my part, but shouldn't that be .......

"Or as the old saying goes: "To be a persecuted genius, you not only have to be persecuted; you also have to be right a genius."

[prion]

"There are those who rest their very identity on the notion of a certain, unchanging past."

Yeah, like all of us who aren't psychotic. Of course the past doesn't change! We may unearth facts that give us new insights, but it is a dangerous liberal conceit that every generation needs to "reinterpret" history to support its own fashionable causes.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

"...There are those who rest their very identity on the notion of a certain, unchanging past..."

Soviet historians, it was said, could fearlessly divine the ineluctable future, but could never predict the ever changing past.

[Snuffington]

In a way this is kind of fun. It has to be terribly embarrassing to esteemed liberal intellectual arms, like the NY Times Review of Books, who lauded this guy to the sky. Now he's not only thoroughly discredited, but he's proving himself to be a full-fledged kook who won't shut up and go away. And he keeps repeating his hilarious "dog ate my homework" excuses to boot. He's dragging down the credibility of all the libs who believed him.

[Kozak]

Soft Skull Press

Seems he found an appropriate publisher. I wonder if Michael Moore has tried them.

[A. Pole]

An academic bombshell, the tome went against long-held beliefs by claiming that few colonial Americans actually owned guns.

Americans at that time were using bows and arrows instead. Or maybe it was American Indians?

Mr. Bellesiles, when asked to explain, provided ever-more outlandish excuses: that his notes had been lost in a flood, that his Web site had been hacked, that he couldn't remember where he'd found certain documents.

Did he check his dog? I suspect that dog ate his notes.

Either way the great discovery of Mr. Bellesiles will become unquestionable truth together with global warming, deadliness of second hand smoking, genetic gay (joyful) nature of homosexuality, benefits of free trade and genocide in Kosovo/Srebrenica.

[IronJack]

This falls under the "I'm OK; You're Not" school of psycho-social dysfunction. You know, the one where all the world is wrong and you're just the misunderstood visionary ...

The sheer hubris of a dullard like this trying to compare himself to some of history's greatest minds. Only on the Left would such utter contempt for humility find a home.

[martin_fierro]

[Atlas Sneezed]

Already posted here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1072808/posts

[neverdem]

I'm curious. Why did you post this article using as the title just part of the original subtitle? I'm not complaining because this fraud Bonehead Bellesiles needs as much exposure as possible.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1072808/posts

[Madstrider]

Mr. Bellesiles's latest response to his critics. This 59-page pamphlet, "Weighed in an Even Balance," is a spirited attempt by Mr. Bellesiles to turn himself into the world's latest misunderstood genius.

The problem here is, why should we believe a word from someone who has proven himself to be a shameless liar? It's like being an employer, getting an application, and seeing that the applicant has listed Bill Clinton as a character reference: Why bother to call, when experience has shown you can't believe a word Bill Clinton says? If Bellesiles (or Bill Clinton) told you that the sky was blue, you'd begin to doubt your own eyes: "Hey, wait a minute -- maybe the sky is really purple ..."

Bellesiles did not merely misinterpret available data. The record clearly shows that Bellesiles not only willfully misrepresented available data but, in some cases, cited data that did not exist.

HE MADE STUFF UP! He's like that crackpot a few years back who bamboozled publishers into believing he had Hitler's diary. Bellesiles was not merely sloppy or inaccurate, he committed historic fraud.

[Joe Brower]

[hattend]

BTTT

[Travis McGee]

Assault Weapon, 1700-1850.

The blunderbuss could throw out a pound of lead balls or rusty nails. Dangerous alley sweepers did not come into being with the invention of self-loading weapons.

Especially when you consider the abysmal state of medical treatment of wounds, it's hard to imagine that lots of dangerous weapons weren't prevalent before the Civil War.

[fire_eye]

His wounded, flapping, quacking, splashing, lame-duck condition notwithsatanding, Bellesiles' discredited book is still available at my local leftist, socialist, Maoist, Stalinist, Communist, Demonrat, Lieberal, "Progressive" bookstore (Powell's Books, in Portland).