Courtesy of a liberal columnist in a liberal paper.

As we are in the midst of a presidential election in a time of divided government, some on the uninformed Left insist that George W. Bush is a latter-day Hitler.

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam takes apart this meme in a column in the International Herald Tribune.

Decades ago I lived in countries that had been occupied by Hitler, where no one made casual comments about Nazism. Even the most fervent dissidents in pre-glasnost Prague or Moscow never likened the totalitarian regimes of the crumbling Soviet empire to Nazi Germany, because they knew something about history. East Bloc dissenters knew that if they had criticized Hitler the way they criticized Leonid Brezhnev and his flunkies, to paraphrase that memorable line from "The Matrix," they would already be dead.

The problem with history is that we never know where we are in it. Are we in the America of John Adams, who championed the Alien and Sedition Acts? Or in Abraham Lincoln's America, where rights to habeas corpus were suspended? Perhaps Bush resembles Woodrow Wilson, who successfully curtailed free speech here in 1917.

Somehow I don't think Bush's liberal critics will be comparing him to Lincoln, Adams or Wilson. Hitler makes for a better headline.

I understand that some folks in this country do not like the President. I know I did not like the last one, and if his wife occupies the Oval Office 18 months from now I won't like her, either. But the sort of absurd, inflammatory rhetoric, coated liberally with historical ignorance and contemptuous venom, that makes the Bush=Hitler comparison is not just offensive, it is absurd. Indeed, I'd go so far as to call it akin to Holocaust denial in its rejection of historical fact and its minimization of the true scope of the evil done by the National SOCIALIST regime.

And let's be honest -- if Bush were really Hitler, Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and the self-styled resistance freedom fighters of Code Pink and International ANSWER would be nothing but ashes blowing in the breeze at some American Auschwitz. That they can make such a comparison without legitimately fearing such a consequence is the proof of how vacuous their argument really is.

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