JamieWeinstein.com

“I never saw anywhere in the news a Democrat carry a picture to any kind of a rally with a picture of Adolf Hitler putting him with a characterization of Bush,” said liberal commentator Ed Schultz on his The Ed Show on MSNBC last week. Ed was challenging his guest, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, who had just reminded big Ed about how Democrats did just that during President George W. Bush’s tenure in office.

It takes some sort of severe amnesia to not remember the constant references made by some liberals comparing Bush and his administration to Nazis. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, I attended a “Peace Festival” on campus where signs depicting George W. Bush as Hitler could be purchased as if it was completely normal. Anyone who remembers watching the anti-war rallies during the Bush years must have seen left-wing activists parade such signs around.

But it wasn’t just the rank-and-file left wing nuts that made the Nazi comparison. Prominent left-wing nuts compared Bush and his administration to Nazis as well.

Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison, for instance, suggested the Sept. 11 attacks were almost like Bush’s Reichstag Fire, a reference to the fire many believe Hitler staged in the German Reichstag and blamed on the communists in order to consolidate his power. Ellison told an audience that 9/11 was “almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

And let us not forget Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin’s absurd and outrageous comparison of Bush Administration interrogation tactics in the War on Terror to the tactics used by Nazi Germany.

But comparing Republicans to Nazis is not a new fad among liberals. It has been a long-standing practice. In his 1988 book The Culture of Terror, leftist icon Noam Chomsky compared Ronald Reagan’s America to Hitler’s Germany. The Associated Press reported that at anti-Reagan protests in three American cities in 1983, young protesters carried signs proclaiming “Reagan: Our Hitler.”

In 1995, Democratic Congressman Major Owens didn’t just compare the new conservative majority in Congress to Nazis, he stated that his conservative colleagues were worse. ''These are the people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler.'' Influential Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel also jumped in on the action. “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things,” Rangel said, suggesting the agenda of the new Republican majority in Congress was worse than Hitler’s agenda.

America’s number one ally in the Middle East, Israel, is routinely branded as acting Nazi-like in certain liberal quarters. Not only is the comparison idiotic and factually unsupportable, it is also morally repugnant. Misusing Nazi analogies is always wrong, but libeling Israel as Nazi-like is particularly vile for obvious reasons.

So, yes Ed, liberal radicals are second to none when it comes to labeling their political opponents as Nazis. Do you need any more evidence?

[This post was adapted from my North Star column Liberals Haven’t Compared Their Rivals to Hitler? I’m Sorry . . . What??]