Why isn’t anyone angry about Republican overuse of Nazi-as-insult?

One of the rules of political discourse that we had until quite recently — enforced most vigorously by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others — was that nobody was allowed to invoke Hitler and Nazis as a political insult. To do so, we heard constantly, was to trivialize Nazisim and the Holocaust and exploit that imagery for cheap political gain.

Several years ago, when MoveOn.org sponsored a contest for producing the best anti-Bush ad of 2004, it received well over 1,000 ads — one of which compared Bush to Hitler. Upon learning of the ad’s content, MoveOn immediately removed the ad, but that did not stem the tidal waves of outraged protests. The ADL’s Executive Director, Abraham Foxman, roared that the ad was “shocking,” “vile” and “outrageous.” RNC Chair Ed Gillespie denounced it as “political hate speech” and demanded that all Democratic presidential candidates condemn it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said comparing political opponents to Hitler is “shameful and beyond the pale and has no place in the legitimate discourse of American politics.”

Similar outrage ensued when Sen. Dick Durbin invoked the behavior of the Nazis in a speech condemning Guantanamo. The very idea of even mentioning Americans and Nazis in the same breath was Despicable, said countless right-wing pundits such as Jonah Goldberg. After all, “The Nazis performed medical experiments on children and gassed whole families” and Hitler thus possesses a “singular villainy.” Goldberg protested:

In the circles frequented by the likes of Durbin — where Howard Dean is a statesman and Michael Moore deserves the Nobel Prize — evil must automatically be associated with “Nazi.”

Now, however, “Nazi” and “Hitler” comparisons have become, by far, the most common political insult on the Right, and these same Jewish advocacy groups are defeaningly silent. It is not merely that every new country on which the Right’s war-crazed faction wants to wage war is “Nazi Germany” and every new leader — or even every political functionary — that does not submit completely to America’s will is “Hitler.” That is true, and it provokes no protests. But the casual, indiscriminate use of “Hitler” and “Nazism” as political exploitation is much more pervasive even than that.