Barton defending Founding Father

Russ Jones   (OneNewsNow.com) Wednesday, August 15, 2012

A book on The New York Times best seller list has been pulled from bookstore shelves across the nation. While the publisher maintains it has received numerous complaints of factual errors in the book, the author has been quick to defend its accuracy.

David Barton, noted historian and founder of WallBuilders, recently release The Jefferson Lies, a book that aims to correct the distorted image of Thomas Jefferson, a once-beloved Founding Father. Writer and professor Warren Throckmorton, however, contends the book features some fibs of its own.

On American Family Radio's "Focal Point" program, Barton recently told host Bryan Fischer that the publishers of book, Thomas Nelson, "lacked confidence in the book."
"That's a tragedy, because Jefferson has really had a tarnished reputation the last 40 years because of academics like Warren Throckmorton," he lamented. "And now that it's starting to get reclaimed, that's a real threat to these guys." Barton noted that if Jefferson cannot be upheld as a "racist" and "anti-Christian secularist," then liberals have no other Founding Father on which to lean. "Thomas Nelson just capitulated and gave in, and … I know they're going to regret that, because they're already getting pounded by people who say the way you handled this was really poor. They admit that this is unprecedented," the historian notes. "They've never jerked a book like this before, in this way, and they're trying to use me as a scapegoat to do that. Which, a month from now this is going to be a tempest in the teapot, because as more stuff comes out on Throckmorton, as we start releasing more and more of our documentation showing how silly his claims are and the other academic claims and how clear history is, people are going to wonder that this was ever an incident. But right now it is."

The Jefferson Lies features a forward by conservative radio host Glenn Beck. To counter Barton's book, Throckmorton has written Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President.