Instapundit: Climategate reminiscent of Bellesiles

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a the Instapundit, makes a sharp observation regarding Climategate:

As this scandal runs on, it’s beginning to remind me of the Michael Bellesiles scandal...

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up.

Read the whole thing.