Just so you know, I get about ten e-mails like this a week. I don’t mean negative e-mail (I get hundreds of those). I mean e-mail from people who think they’re making a brilliant, devastating, point about my book which is actually painfully stupid if you’d actually read the dust jacket, never mind the first few pages. It’s as if these people don’t understand that I don’t get the irony of the title.

It gets old:

Subject: “Oh, by the way”
“Liberalism” (a good thing, the driving force behind all of the beneficial and salutary legislation this country has ever seen, despite mossbacked conservative opposition) and “fascism” (a bad thing, the driving force behind Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini and now on full display in the U.S. with the ongoing merging and amplification of state, military and corporate power, especially under reich-wing Republicans) are mutually exclusive entities.
Thus the intellectual carelessness, fallaciousness and outright dishonesty of your most recent book’s title. It’s patently ridiculous. It’s akin to saying “democratic totalitarianism.”
I’m sure that other reality-based individuals — those who recognize and accept that facts unquestionably have a liberal bias — have pointed this out to you.
Oh, you CON-servatives! Why the seething hatred of these United States?

Update: Lots of readers missed my point, or drove right past it and started arguing with the above e-mail. Look, I know the above e-mail is wrong. And yes, I know “democratic totalitarianism” is actually a serious concept. I know why I named my book liberal fascism, too! Thanks for the support, but my point was simply to vent. Perils of late-night blogging.