It's interesting to see the sparks fly when a writer for a magazine gets a negative review from the home team. Ramesh Ponnuru dissed and dismissed David Frum's latest offering, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, in the pages of National Review as factually challenged. "Usually when I did check one of [David Frum's] claims," Ramesh Ponnuru writes, "it didn't bear out. Frum portrays himself as a bold truth-teller who is being pounced on by ideological enforcers on the right." In reality, the NR scribe contends, NRO's Frum is guilty of "pervasive sloppiness." Frum, for his part, counters that Ponnuru's criticisms suffer from a "weird combination of vitriol and grandiosity."

The Ponnuru-Frum spat is just one of several internecine fights on the Right over book reviews in recent weeks. It's lively again, and I like it. In several instances, the disagreements have gotten quite nasty. This is especially true of the dispute between Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, and Austin Bramwell, author of a scathing review of said book in The American Conservative. "Goldberg does at times display a blush of shame," Bramwell writes. "He qualifies his conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time. He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian temptation, so that we are 'all' fascists now. Why then link liberalism in particular with fascism?"

"I'm not particularly interested in what Austin Bramwell has to say about anything, never mind yours truly," Goldberg, in turn, writes. Taking Bramwell to task for some specific points, Goldberg then dubs Bramwell "famously self-important." Think there was more than we know to Bramwell's brief tenure on National Review's board?

I've read Liberal Fascism, and I share a few of Bramwell's criticisms. But I am confused as to why he thinks there is nothing to commend there. The review, I think, comes off as player hating. Just because a book has an arresting title and a marketable cover doesn't automatically classify it in the conservative-quickie category. I thought the first four chapters, detailing Hitler and Mussolini as men of the Left, and Wilson and FDR as imbibers from the same stream of ideas, were quite good. At a time when National Review is being knocked for abandoning ideas in favor of political journalism, it's a welcome sign that one of its leading writers has sparked an intellectual debate instead of commenting on a presidential one.

The most disappointing of these reviews, for me, was Ronald Radosh's lame review of Stan Evans's Blacklisted by History in the pages of National Review. NR's choice of Ronald Radosh, raised in a Communist household to believe Joe McCarthy was Torquemada reincarnated, seems a case of an editor assigning a review to predetermine its slant. How many red-diaper baby recovering Marxists who wrote for The Nation well into their forties could ever write a positive review about a pro-McCarthy book? The review's cowardly insinuation (say it if you want to say it) that Evans plagiarized from Radosh's Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism was completely disgusting. I've read both books, and I find Radosh's charge narcissistic--much more narcissistic than my use of the first person earlier in this sentence (And his book on the Amerasia case wasn't particularly good anyhow--though Red Star over Hollywood and The Rosenberg Files were). Radosh's embarrassing piece is unavailable online, which is probably a good thing for him. But this hasn't stopped Ann Coulter, Paul Gottfried, and Wesley MacDonald defending, to various degrees, Evans.

What's interesting is that two of National Review's founding fathers, L. Brent Bozell and William F. Buckley, wrote the initial, canonical McCarthy defense, McCarthy and His Enemies, more than a year before founding the publication. The pages of the journal were opened up to the Wisconsin senator in its early days. One of NR's writers actually ghost wrote McCarthy's infamous speech indicting George C. Marshall's judgment as counter to American interests. It's more than fifty years later, and most of those guys are dead now. Times change, and so do magazines.

I've just finished Blacklisted by History, and I must say it is excellent in style and substance. If there is a quicker 605 pages, please let me know. From proving beyond doubt that McCarthy correctly identified Annie Lee Moss as a Communist to detailing the Army's punishment of whistleblowers but promotion of Communists, Evans makes a strong case that McCarthy was more sinned against than sinner. By relying on FBI files and wiretap transcripts, Venona intercepts, and released material from the Soviet archives, as well as interviews of a few of the surviving witnesses to McCarthy's famous Wheeling speech charging Communist infiltration of the State Department, Evans's book works from a much larger pool of information than did Buckley and Bozell's.

If any publicity is good publicity, these authors should be thanking their antagonists.