Comparisons legitimate & illegitimate

Last night I enjoyed one of my favorite evening pastimes, watching Jon Stewart nail Bill O'Reilly's head to the floor. In this case, the carpentry was occasioned by O'Reilly's typically blustering response to Stewart's earlier skewering of Megyn Kelly for insisting, in the face of comically overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Fox doesn't compare people to Nazis. Kelly was, of course, alluding to remarks by Steve Cohen (D-TN) earlier in the week, which compared Republican disinformation on health care reform to the fabled "big lie" tactics of the Nazi propaganda machine.

What struck me about the whole exchange was that everyone took it for granted that Cohen was out of line simply for making a comparison to the Nazis. I saw little effort to elucidate the reasons why the comparison was invalid; it was judged to be so, prima facie, simply because of its object.

I was reminded of an exchange during a Senate hearing a long time ago, on some security issue or other, when a witness pointed to an inconsistency between US policy and our pronouncements on Soviet policy, and a Republican senator harrumphed, "Are you comparing the Soviet Union to the United States of America?"

Damn straight he was, Senator.

Allow me to state, as a categorical principle, that anything in the universe can be compared to anything else in the universe. The comparison may or may not be valid; that must be judged by examining it. It will be valid to the precise degree that the object of the comparison resembles, in salient, relevant aspects, its subject. It is never invalid merely by virtue of the object's identity. I can compare you to Hitler, Jesus Christ, Mae West or Fred Flintstone, and in every case the comparison must be judged on its specific merits.

The contrary principle, as observed by all parties in the Stewart/Fox brouhaha, provides wonderful cover for evildoers and hypocrites. Comparison is fundamental to human communication: we understand things in terms of their resemblance to other things much more readily and deeply than in terms of their abstract attributes. When you declare certain persons or phenomena off limits for comparative purposes, you make it more difficult to describe anything that resembles them. If comparisons to Nazis are inherently beyond the pale, then those who behave, to any significant degree, like the Nazis will be that much harder to call out.

Perhaps Cohen's comparison was off base--but if so, we need to hear why. Simply saying, "Oh! He said they were like Nazis! How dreadfully inappropriate!" is mere noise. Stewart, if no one else, should know better.