You can read that both ways, really.

I've been hearing that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has now reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Being as such, one might possibly expect it to be featured in the front section of a bookstore -- or for them to even have a copy available on the shelves!

Today, I walked into my nearby B&N, and, nope, not a trace of the book in sight. The computer claimed there was at least one copy in stock, but it certainly wasn't in it's assigned place -- and certainly wasn't featured prominently anywhere I could detect. Even if we argue other customers hid the remaining copy of it, that would seem to imply B&N was at least not interested in keeping many copies in stock and in the correctly-assigned location.

(Don't tell me corporations are always motivated by greed, okay?)

When I was a kid, a close friend of mine (who wasn't terribly political, but was quite humorous) used to jokingly say "hang a Commie" and "hang a Fascist" instead of telling someone to "hang a left" or "hang a right" at this corner. Even though it was just a joke, and I was just in middle school, his joking made me wonder: What kind of odd spectrum puts similar-seeming dictatorships on both ends? I wondered maybe if Hitler wasn't "right wing" at all, but didn't really know. Eventually, I concluded I had to be mistaken: that many people couldn't be wrong about such a thing, could they?

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had wondered about that, as Goldberg really seems to have tapped into a vein: Lots of God-fearing small-government conservatives must have wondered why on earth they were being linked to a German mystic socialist who used Nietzsche and Marx as his models. Now they're buying Goldberg's book because it blows the lid off what they been suspecting all along.

(I had gotten as far as starting to suspect Woodrow Wilson had something to do with it all, and was even reading Herbert Croley when Goldberg's book came out and brought all that formerly-obscure stuff to the public attention -- or at least the attention of millions of anti-government conservatives who were tired of being likened to pro-government National Socialists.)

I'm a terrible person in some ways. Many of the people I love are politically liberal, and I really don't wish them any harm or ill feelings. But it is kind of nice, I'll admit, to see the left screaming and squirming about suddenly being rather convincingly associated with the guy they loved to bash the right with for the last 60 years.

And the funny part is, it's all true.

Well, I'd like to hope this would help us learn from history: that eugenics, which is now arising in the European left (and American left, to some extent, as well) is a bad move, that reflexively blaming Jewish influence (again gaining momentum on the left) portends ill, that undermining property rights by offering socialism isn't okay as long as it seems "nationalist" (Chavez, Cuba, the EU), that environmentalism can be used as a pretext for power... but the people who most need to notice those patterns are, sadly, those least likely to learn that these indeed were important elements of Nazism, and the American progressive movement which preceded it.

And sorry, but we're all knee-deep in Godwin's law here anyway.