Recently, Ramesh Ponnuru has written a book titled The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. Ever since the book came out, both him and his colleagues on National Review Online have been stunned that people have been interpreting the title of the book to be an attack on the Democrats. You see "party" doesn't refer to a political party, it refers to a gathering of people. Anyone who reads the book extremely carefully and talks to the author would know about that, so why are people reacting so negatively towards the obvious and intentional slander?
I've been reading the posts about poor poor Ponnuru and how he keeps having liberals react poorly to the title of his book all week, so something struck me when I was driving home yesterday. I was flipping through stations and I came across Michael Savage (big mistake I know) talking about his book, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder. He was busy explaining how the title didn't mean that liberals were mentally disordered, but really was some more subtle nuanced point that involved a redefinition of the phrase "mental disorder."
This is politics, not math class. You don't get to redefine your terms to mean whatever you want. If you want title your book in a manner that will give your supporters a bumper sticker slogan to attack their opponents, you have to accept that the people you disagree with are likely to clue in to your subtle tactic and call you on it. If you call a Jew a "kike," I'm not going to really care about your nuance about how not all Jews are kikes and how there are gentile kikes. [1] I'm just not going to talk to you for a while.
This reminds me of the anti-"political correctness" movement. Free speech, under that theory, means that people can feel free to insult anyone they want, but if the insulted points out that they were hurt by the insult, they're just trying to censor the speaker. Actions have consequences. You have the right to slander me, but don't be surprised if I don't feel like doing you a favor down the line. You have the right to use racial slurs, but don't be surprised if you have trouble keeping a job afterwards. And yes, you have the right to title your book whatever you want. Just don't be surprised when people react to your inflammatory title instead of just shrugging it off and pretending that you complimented them.
[1] Obviously, this argument gets used more frequently by people who want to use racial slurs without taking the hit, but I'm more comfortable using a slur on Jews as I'm Jewish and therefore it's less likely to get me involved in side issues about what I meant by the word, which would be all too ironic.