Hate Speech From the Left:

Such venom should be beyond the political and social pale. But too many liberals would still rather dismiss conservative ideas with a ugly slur than actually grapple with them on the merits. Debating the pros and cons of racial preferences or US foreign policy can be difficult; much easier to simply hiss "Racist!" or "Nazi!" or some equally poisonous insult.

"What you have now" -- this is left-wing activist and actress Janeane Garofalo, analyzing the Republican Party during an appearance at the 92d Street Y in New York earlier this year -- "is people that are closet racists, misogynists, homophobes, and people who love . . . the politics of exclusion identifying as conservative." That was apparentlygood enough to win her a guest-host slot on CNN's "Crossfire," where she offered this thoughtful critique of the Patriot Act: "It is in fact a conspiracy of the 43d Reich."

Ah, yes, the reductio ad Hitlerum. Why meet a conservative with facts or logic when you can simply tar him with the Nazi brush? Thus we had Nancy Giles on the "CBS Sunday Morning show" sourly tying Rush Limbaugh's "edgy" radio manner to you-know-who's. "Hitler would have killed in talk radio," Giles declared. "He was edgy, too." Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News struck a similar note in commenting on "The Reagans," the cancelled miniseries. "If Hitler had more friends," she told The Washington Post, "CBS wouldn't have aired [its Hitler mini-series] either."

But of course no one came in for more Hitler comparisons this year than George W. Bush. Third Reich references were practically a staple of antiwar rhetoric.

The president "is not the orator that Hitler was," acknowledged leftist commentator Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch.org. "But comparisons of the Bush administration's fearmongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels . . . are not at all out of line."

Such repugnant comparisons are in fact *wildly* out of line. But so long as the double standard persists, liberals will continue to make them with impunity.