From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:
It was a tough week for supporters of Donald Trump’s draconian policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants at the border. (Those supporters are overwhelmingly Republican: a Quinnipiac University poll showed only 27 percent of all respondents–but 55 percent of GOP backers–endorse the practice.) It began when former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden posted an image of Auschwitz and remarked simply, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.” By Monday, the clashing sound bites vomited forth by the president and his DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reduced the administration’s defense to something like this:
We are not separating families. Period. Except when we are, which is both Democrats’ fault and essential policy.
The United Nations was unimpressed. Having already declared the family separation policy a violation of international law, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees labeled Trump’s initiative “government-sanctioned child abuse.” By Tuesday, Trump was back on Twitter defending taking more than 2,000 children from their parents (many of them asylum seekers), while warning of the “animals” who will “infest our Country,” language which Bill Kristol noted “probably sounds better in the original German.”
By Wednesday, when Trump signed his scam masquerading as an executive order, some of the conservatives’ best and brightest had enough of the backlash. “Comparisons to Auschwitz are ludicrous and offensive,” Daniella Greenbaum protested, because they “will only serve to highlight how Trump and his policies are not quite as bad as they could be.” Ben Shapiro, the former Breitbart propagandist the New York Times elevated as a “provocative ‘gladiator'” for young conservatives, complained that “Nazi has become a stand-in for ‘thing I don’t like.’ And that means that everything you don’t like becomes ‘Nazi policy.'”
Pretty much every liberal policy that conservatives compare to Nazi policy is benign. It is like condemning vegetarianism because Hitler was a vegetarian late in life. Scratch that; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of them do that. OK: it is like condemning dog owners because Hitler owned a dog. Dog ownership is not the reason we condemn Nazism and we are not in danger of becoming Nazis just by owning dogs, so there is no sense in bringing it up. For the same reason, there is no sense in comparing liberal health care policies to Nazism.
Liberals are guilty of abusing Nazi comparisons as well, but at least their comparisons tend to focus on the two biggest reasons we condemn the Nazis: harm and nationalism. I can stand well-meaning liberal exaggeration of the harms of conservatism much more than I can stand disingenuous conservative demonization of liberalism via association.
But I can stand both more than I can stand the Shapiros (and Hannitys and Limbaughs) of the world, who have the gall to demand civility when they have never exhibited it themselves and have in fact encouraged millions to act the same way.