Stop Calling Bush a Nazi
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

To My Fellow Livid Liberals: A piece of unsolicited advice: If you want to live in a country where a woman has a right to choose, where gay people are free to marry, where health care is available to all, where the middle and lower class do not shoulder the tax burdens of the rich, where we respect the natural environment in which we live, and where medical research is guided by science and not by God, then please, please do yourselves a favor and right this minute stop comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler.
Why do I bring this up? Listen to my experience. On the day after the election I had a heated conversation with one set of liberals and a protracted e-mail exchange with another that involved otherwise intelligent Kerry voters comparing the 43rd president to the Nazi fuhrer. “Hitler used propaganda to create national pride in a way that is so similar to what Bush and Cheney use, it’s really quite scary,” wrote my friend. Bush is just as bad as Hitler, went the gist of a conversation I happened into at the liberal graduate school I attend in Manhattan. This comes on top of the signs carried by legions of anti-war protesters over the past few years that have proclaimed the same.
The comparison of Bush and Hitler is not only ridiculous, it more importantly undermines our chances to win back this country and to foster the kind of America in which we want to live.
It is ridiculous because while President Bush may have many flaws, building concentration camps to gas millions of innocent civilians is not one of them. Abu Ghraib is an abomination, but it is not Auschwitz. And though my fellow liberals may cringe when they read this: The Hitler in the Iraq equation is not George Bush but Saddam Hussein. Does anyone remember the Kurds?
To borrow some terms from the right, calling Mr. Bush a Nazi is just the type of moral equivalency that has helped to land us “four more years.” The conservatives out there in red America think we have got our morals all wrong, and not just in the realm of domestic policy. The notion of moral values spills over into foreign policy and the war on terror, in which though Mr. Kerry vowed to do whatever it takes to defend America, Mr. Bush was seen as the candidate who was not afraid to call an evil an evil.
America wants, and yes, needs this in a leader, so it cannot help the liberal cause to have its emissaries parading around calling Mr. Bush a Nazi. Say what you want about the president, he’s a fundamentalist, he’s didactic, he’s wrong on important issues, but a Nazi he is not. So calling him one is not only a major misnomer, it is a terrible public relations campaign for those who want to see America marching in a new direction. For the truly conservative, it must only cement the notion that the only place the liberals are headed is to hell.
Liberals, this election cemented for us what we already know: we have the moral high ground. The Republicans preach freedom for the Middle East, even as they vote in such people as Senator DeMint, who said gay people shouldn’t be public school teachers. In order for us to build the kind of liberal society in which we want to live, in which freedom means not fewer regulations for corporate conglomerates but the right to live a long and healthy life in which we are free to love whom we choose, then we must be able to show the rest of the country that we can tell true evil from just plain awful, misguided, and prejudiced policy.
Ms. Phillips-Stoll, a former editor at the Forward, is a student of psychology at New School University.