A HALF CENTURY OF THE LEFT’S BIG LIE: Every Republican presidential candidate has been smeared as Hitler:

Goldwater was Hitler. Nixon was Hitler. Reagan was Hitler. Bush was Hitler. None of the latter three men declared the Fourth Reich, made themselves dictators for life and ran concentration camps. But the Big Lie retroactively rewrites the past by claiming that last decade’s Hitler was a decent moderate while the latest Republican Hitler is a terrifying monster. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan were all resurrected as moderate contrasts to each other and then to Bush. The process of recreating Bush as a moderate has already begun. And so each Republican makes the electoral journey from Hitler to a political moderate whom a latter generation of liberals mourns while complaining that this latest Republican really is Hitler.

Actually, it’s almost 70 years of the big lie — Harry Truman compared Thomas Dewey to Hitler in the bitter last days of his 1948 election bid. (In December 1942, Roosevelt shocked White House correspondents when he presented an iron cross to an isolationist-supporting journalist at the New York Daily News he despised.)