I know it’s been mentioned already, but Franck & Whelan’s tag-team on Joseph Ellis is just brutal in the best blogoriffic sense. I particularly liked this point from Franck, which is not the most intellectually devastating but for some reason strikes a chord:

It also bears pointing out that Joseph Ellis has sold a lot of books thanks to the American reading public’s deep admiration of the founders. It strikes me as bad form indeed for a man to profit from that admiration and then sneer at it in the pages of the Washington Post. Perhaps he is trying to win back some campus cred with his fellow historians who like to pretend that “great men” make less of a difference in history than they do. It must make him feel guilty sometimes that he doesn’t go with the flow and write books no one reads about people no one has heard of.