I went to the Heritage Foundation today to hear David Horowitz discuss his newly published collection of essays, The Black Book of the American Left. Maybe, I thought, I could figure out why his personal views of Left and the Right necessitated the ad hominem attacks, the smears of American Betrayal, as completely rebutted in copious if not excruciating detail in The Rebuttal  (not "Book-Burners," as Horowitz misstated today).

I don't know what I learned, but I surely witnessed something strange.

Watch the clip above and fact-check Horowitz with "The Rebuttal" in three parts as published by Breitbart News  here, or The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners with Additional Commentary from the Blogosphere here.

Favorite Horo-whopper: "She's got a whole book, it's 22,000 words, it's called "Book Burners," for one bad review --  I mean, come on!"

Is he kidding?

A partial list:

In "An American Threat," Gates of Vienna discusses this same Q&A and focuses on a more confessional line from Horowitz. Referring to my book, Horowitz explained why American Betrayal is such a "very, very bad book."

DH: "I see it as a threat to everything that I’ve done, and that Radosh has done, and that Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes and all of the conservatives who have dredged up the information from the archives about Communist influence.”

GoV's bottom line: "This is not about academic matters. This is not about history. This is a personal conflict initiated by someone who feels his pre-eminent position being threatened by another writer’s book."

This put me in mind of both Bukovsky's and Evans' basic underlying explanations for the attacks: American Betrayal "follow[s] the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid" (Bukovsky), and American Betrayal overturns "court history" (Evans).

"This book is a complete reinterpretation of the Second World War based on the presence of Soviet agents and Communists and sympathizers, fellow travelers in the Roosevelt adminstration," Horowitz said (surprisingly accurate, as far as it goes).

As American Betrayal's "reinterpretation" gains traction, that leaves an awful lot of history and politics in need of an overhaul.

The threat? Why?