Thanks primarily to a certain billionaire from New York, as the weeks have marched on in the Republican presidential nominating process, the rhetoric has continued to plumb new depths in crassness and incivility.  However, in the past few days, those vehemently opposed to Donald Trump have gone a bridge too far in comparing him, either overtly or by implication, to Hitler or Mussolini or even other brutal despots of the past century. It has been somewhat of a staple of political bombast in the United States, first used primarily by the left but now increasingly by both sides of the political spectrum, to compare their adversaries to the primary villains of World War II.  Today, about 10% of the population was alive during those tumultuous years, and far fewer have any recollection of those days.  It has become much too easy to demean and diminish the genesis and consequences of that fateful period. The indiscriminate comparison of one’s political...(Read Full Post)