The right wing's abundance of Mengele comparisons

Yesterday on The War Room, Jim Quinn lambasted Donald Berwick, President Obama's appointee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for comments Berwick made about Britain's National Health Service. Quinn repeated the falsehood that Berwick “is having a romantic affair with the British health care system” to declare that Berwick “is going to be the senior citizens' Dr. Mengele.”

Likening the new administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to the “Angel of Death” -- the Nazi concentration camp doctor infamous for human experiments -- appears preposterous. However, Quinn is not the first conservative to invoke Dr. Josef Mengele to smear Democrats.

Bob Owens, a recent addition to the Washington Examiner's roster, recently blogged a scathing attack on Kagan, titled "Elena Mengele Kagan." In attaching Kagan's name to the name of the murderous Nazi doctor, Owens perpetuated the false claim that Kagan improperly influenced the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to change its position on so-called partial-birth abortion.

It seems the entire population of Democrats has encountered the wrath of conservatives anxious to compare them to Mengele. In 2005, Michael Savage attacked Democrats over the Terri Schiavo controversy by comparing them to Mengele en masse:

What is difficult for we the living to comprehend is the reason they can engage in such anti-life abominations is because they have no souls. They have said that the tears of Terri Schiavo are mechanical. They have said that her smile is reflexive. They can rip an emerging child from the womb, murder it, and call this a compassionate act. Like Mengele -- the doctor of death from the Nazi concentration camps -- the radical, soulless Democrats keep referring to “the doctors,” as if a medical degree guaranteed humanity.

Maybe it's time conservatives lay off the repulsive, lazy, and falsehood-based comparisons to Mengele.