Political comparisons to Hitler, Nazi party are uninformed, illegitimate

I abhor the media.  I sit at home and have the displeasure of watching a few minutes of MSNBC or FOXNEWS or one of the many political channels, and I get sick.  I tell myself to watch cartoons or just forget about it, but it's impossible.

The biggest thing I cannot stand is when these political mouthpieces use celebrities or pseudo-celebrities to argue political points.  It makes absolutely no sense.  

There is one thing famous people do in particular which consistently makes me foam at the mouth, and that is the comparison of someone to Hitler or the Nazi's. It's as if everyone wants to use this metaphor and it is flat out wrong.

I had a high school teacher tell me that George Bush was the equivalent of Hitler and that if he got assassinated, the country would have been better off.  As ludicrous as it sounds, I heard a student on this campus who is training to be a teacher say Obama was the antichrist and needed to be "taken out."

It is called a fallacy of association.  More popularly, this mistake is known as Godwin's law.  The basic idea is that if you are ignorant enough to make the comparison of your enemy to Hitler or the Nazis, then you have proven yourself incapable of reasonable thought or argument to counter them.  

You should not listen to these people speak about politics.  If they open their mouths to talk about anything other than their profession, you are probably better off changing the channel.

In a more contemporary example, Ann Coulter, who is always full of lovely information, compared the Occupy Wall Street protestors to a "demonic league."

Perhaps more importantly, while she described the Occupy Wall Street protestors, she made comparisons to the movement.  She claimed "[the] French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and with only slight modification when the Nazis were coming to power...This is always the beginning of totalitarianism."

Clearly she was only taking the time out of our busy lives to demonstrate her ignorance.  The French Revolution was very different from the Russian, and both were extraordinarily far removed from the process of the Nazis coming to power.

Hitler and the Nazi party were legally elected to office. There was no coup.  Secondly, the French Revolution succeeded in overthrowing an abusive and excessive monarchy, not a participatory republic with a constitution.  Finally, the Russian Revolution resulted in the overthrowing of another monarchy for the promise of a communist utopia, which did not turn out exactly as planned. Regardless, not a single one of these comparisons warrant an ounce of consideration.

I am a student of history and I understand that all three of those movements ultimately resulted in some form of a violent dictatorship.  However, the goals of those three events and the goals of Occupy Wall Street are just not the same.

The Occupy Wall Street focus, since the movement began four months ago, was on reforming the economy and openly discussing the unfair and abusive practices that have been carried out by major corporations. Their aim has been to eliminate the excesses of the top one percent of society, and try and cross the widening poverty gap.

 Most of these protestors are young college graduates who could not find a job.  Considering most of us will fall into that category in one way or another fairly soon, I think it's important to recognize these protests as a legitimate social movement.  

These people are not revolutionaries, and they are certainly not Nazis.  The practice of calling your enemy a Nazi needs to stop.  It shows itself as ignorant and repugnant time and time again.  Whether you are on the left or on the right, this particular comparison is asinine.

It is unfair to the memory of the Holocaust and World War II that celebrities who receive national airtime continue to invoke this erroneous and hurtful label upon their ideological enemies.