All This and World War II

In the future, all tenuously-acquired aesthetic beliefs will be the equivalent of World War II for at least 15 minutes — and the future is now:

An animal rights activist has been charged with hiring a hit man to kill a random fur-wearer, the New York Daily News reports.

An Ohio woman who compared animal-welfare work to the liberation of World War II concentration camps has been charged with soliciting a hit man to fatally shoot or slit the throat of a random fur-wearer, federal authorities said.

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show. One of her defense attorneys, Walter Lucas, declined comment when reached by phone after the court appearance.

Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.

But Al Gore told me that global warming was the equivalent of the Holocaust. Time magazine said it was the equivalent of World War II. Paul Krugman told me that the Obama economic “stimulus” was the equivalent of World War II. And Jimmy Carter told me that alternative energy was “the moral equivalent of war.” Since they all got there first with this nearly-century old metaphor, how can animal “rights” also be the equivalent of World War II?