DANIEL GREENFIELD: Every Republican is Hitler.

Mayor Jack Shelley of San Francisco claimed that Goldwater strategists got all their ideas from Mein Kampf.

FDR accused Republican candidate Wendell Willkie of using “Hitler tactics” by repeating his slogans frequently.

In the Iran-Contra trial, Oliver North was accused of “following Adolf Hitler’s official strategy”. What did one have to do with the other? Nothing. But this sort of lazy accusation had become typical and routine. William Shirer, who had also compared Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi to the Holocaust and called Nixon an “apt pupil” of Hitler (Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim was Goebbels), compared Reagan to Hitler for intervening in Grenada. Then Shirer compared Bush I to Hitler for trying to outlaw flag burning.

By the Reagan years, the left had achieved a banality of Hitler analogies. Everything Reagan did was just like Hitler. All of Reagan’s associates were just like Hitler. It was Hitlers all the way down.

Exit quote: “Everyone, to leftists, is Hitler except the Islamic terrorists allied with Hitler who are trying to kill Jews today.”

To today’s leftists those Jews are also Hitler, of course: This year’s Harvard commencement speaker compared Israel to Nazi Germany.