Not the first time a Nazi analogy has tripped lightly from his lips in this area, although like Cardinal Martino, he doesn’t quite have the stones to own up to what he means. He’s not comparing Gaza to a German death camp, you see, just to your average, run-of-the-mill concentration camp. The fact that he coughed up the word “blitzkrieg” literally in the same breath is but an unhappy coincidence.

A passage from Hitchens’s review of Buchanan’s World War II revisionism is worth quoting:

As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany’s grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was “not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war.” Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it’s only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s.

Exit question: Wasn’t Russia’s assault on Georgia this summer a “blitzkrieg” too? No, wait, I forgot — that was our fault. Click the image to watch.