If you call the Republican president of the United States a Nazi, or even briefly allow your server to host a video calling him a Nazi, the right will unleash hell ... but comparing the possible next president of the United States (a Democrat) to Stalin or Mussolini is, of course, just fine and dandy.

Here's an editorial from Investor's Business Daily:

Sen. Hillary Clinton shared on Tuesday her vision of the U.S. economy under her executive stewardship. She should change her party affiliation -- or the name of her party.

Speaking in New Hampshire, Clinton acknowledged that instead of the "ownership society" that George W. Bush has promoted throughout his presidency, she prefers a "we're all in it together society" where prosperity is "broadly shared."

This is the sort of "it takes a village" rhetoric that tickles the ears of the left, and which can't give up its romantic notions of a collectivist utopia.

Dreams of the left, however, always turn out to be nightmares, and the world has seen its share of all-in-it-together societies that have failed. The Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea and the worker's paradise/island prison of Cuba enter the mind right away.

...We're not here to label Hillary Clinton a socialist, but we really don't have to; she's done that job for us. The economic proposals she's lining up behind expose an undeniable affinity for raw socialism....

There's also a blog post on the same Clinton speech from right-wing talk-show host Neal Boortz that declares her to be engaged in a "war on individualism" and begins with two quotes:

"Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position."

[Mario Palmieri, "The Philosophy of Fascism" 1936]

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."

[Hillary Clinton, 1993]

Let me point out that that last quote is all over the Internet -- but I challenge you to find the sentence quoted anywhere in context. It's just a sentence in isolation, always ascribed to Hillary Clinton, usually with the date 1993.

Did she ever actually say this? And if she didn't, will anyone on the right ever acknowledge that she didn't? Or (far more likely) will the (mis)quote simply work its way up the media food chain -- "proof" that she's a fascist/collectivist/totalitarian -- especially if she actually does get the nomination?

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UPDATE: And then there's this, from former "Ten Commandments judge" Roy Moore:

Why, then, do social liberals like Hillary Clinton push so hard for the expansion of preschool programs? ... When the mind of a young child is subjected to state control before fundamental concepts and basic beliefs are formulated, the child is much more likely to learn a liberal social and political philosophy with the state as his or her master. Creation and God-given rights are more easily replaced with evolution and government-granted rights. Totalitarian regimes like those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin knew well the value of a "youth corps." As Hans Schemm, leader of the Nazi Teacher's League, once observed, "Those who have the youth on their side control the future."

Yikes.

(Via Right Wing Watch.)