THE FOOL ON THE HILL:

Shot: McCartney, in Interview, Compares Global Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers.

—Fox News, June 24, 2010.

Chaser: What a set of Wings! Sir Paul McCartney flies back to the UK with his entourage on a private jet as he takes a quick break from his One On One world tour.

—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.

As the Professor likes to say, I’ll believe global cooling/global warming/climate change/climate chaos is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s crisis themselves. And then there’s the issue of how badly the singularly evil legacy of the Holocaust is cheapened by using it as a talking point to smother dissent. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in September of 2003 as the left’s “Bush Equals Hitler” mania was just going into overdrive:

So if you can’t show me the death camps and the horror, find another example. Compare Bush to Bismarck or Franco or Mikey from the Life cereal commercials for all I care — because any of those would make more sense.

By the way, I don’t say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

Indeed.