Nazi Comparisons In Health Debate Cheapen The Evil Nazis Perpetrated

You would think that where they are invoked to make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.

But in modern America, unfortunately, rhetoric often starts over the top and goes up from there. So fine, George W. Bush is "a smirking chimp." Fine, Barack Obama is "a Chicago thug." We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn't say that it has to be intelligent.

And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler.

Yet every time I hear that, it makes me cringe for what it says about our absurd collective propensity for historical amnesia and our retarded capacity for reverence. Once upon a lifetime ago, 6 million people with DNA, names and faces just like you and I, were butchered with gleeful sadism and mechanistic dispatch. "Six million people."

You and I may no longer respect one another, but is it asking too much that we still respect them?

Leonard Pitts' column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is [e-mail].