...and neither is anybody else.

TRY GOOGLING “+obama+hitler” and you’ll come up with eight and a half million references. Switch on talk radio and you’re liable to hear twice as many before cocktail time. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently succumbed to the temptation, insinuating certain parallels between the American president and the German dictator.

But it isn’t just Obama who gets compared this way. Playing the Hitler card is quickly becoming America’s pastime. It certainly requires a lot less skill than baseball. Whether it is Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, Rush Limbaugh, Kim Jung Il or Vladimir Putin – they have all seen their card pulled from the deck the moment they got in someone’s way. And as everyone knows, there’s “only one way” to deal with Hitler. But this is not just a diversion. FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly famously compared abortionist Dr. George Tiller to Hitler and the Nazis, and we have seen the result.

George Orwell had this game figured out as early as 1946, and probably much earlier than that: “The word Fascism has now no meaning,” he wrote, “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Back in 1953 neocon philosopher Leo Strauss identified the “reductio ad Hitlerum,” by which any person or argument could be demolished by even the most tenuous association with Hitler. (Example: Hitler liked German shepherd dogs. Joe Blow likes German shepherd dogs. Ergo, Joe Blow is like Hitler. Joe Blow is Hitler.) Today anyone who has ever ventured onto an Internet forum knows all about “Godwin’s Law,” which states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Rants about “econazis” and “feminazis” clog the blogosphere like hair in a sink. While the United States does not have a monopoly on this sort of rhetoric, it’s hard to imagine a country where the H name is thrown around with less basic curiosity about the man and his career.

I think it’s time we put the bite back into this name. So who was Hitler really and how useful is he as a political touchstone? In the following I have compiled a list of ten key character traits of the historical Hitler that can be used as points of comparisons with other public figures. So step up and take the challenge: Can your favorite politician or pundit pass the Hitler test?

1. A complete absence of normal human relationships. Hitler never married (aside from a last-minute hitch in the bunker), had no known children, and conducted only a handful of enigmatic relationships with women that usually ended in suicide or attempted suicide. Despite many rumors about Hitler’s abnormal sexual practices, there is no solid evidence that he ever engaged in any sexual practices. The one true love of his life appears to have been his young niece Geli Raubal, who was still a minor the first time they met. This incestuous liaison also ended with her suicide. Nor did Hitler have any friends. His relationships with his subordinates were always cool, and he ordered the only real friend he could be said to have had – Storm Trooper commander Ernst Röhm – shot as a traitor in 1934. Without any human attachments, he was literally a man with nothing to lose.
   
2. An utter lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Hitler may have appeared polite and even charming to his entourage, and yet he did not hesitate when it came to literally exterminating entire peoples and sacrificing his own armies to hopeless causes. When informed in the latter stages of the war that thousands of young German officers were being slaughtered by the Red Army merely so that he could postpone the inevitable, Hitler’s only reply was “But that’s what the young people are there for.”
   
3. Eccentric health habits. Hitler was a teetotaler, anti-smoker, and vegetarian. Now these are all wise lifestyle choices in themselves, but they are disturbing in a man not otherwise interested in physical fitness and sports. This focus on bland food and quack medicine highlighted a general eccentricity and an unwholesome obsession with his health and mortality that cut him off from the rest of humanity.
   
4. A previous history of failure ending with treatment for acute psychosis. Hitler failed wretchedly at everything he put his hand to before joining the German army in 1914, and even there he was never promoted beyond corporal despite four years of loyal service. After being temporarily blinded by a gas attack in November of 1918, and then hearing the news of his country’s defeat while recuperating in a military hospital, Hitler suffered a mental breakdown and received psychotherapy. This marked the start of his political career. What he himself viewed as a moment of illumination probably had a more clinical definition. However, the Gestapo destroyed all of Hitler’s medical records after he came to power, so we will never now the exact nature of this breakdown and how it affected his later career. But political epiphanies are always suspect. Every Hitler candidate should have at least one such episode in his or her past.
5. The ability to forge vast coalitions and bring together vastly different people. Hitler’s popularity among his own people did not stand at twenty percent or thirty percent or even sixty percent, but at as much as ninety percent at one time. His charisma and his promises (including, yes, the Autobahn and the VW) united millionaires, army generals, engineers, academics, tradesmen, workers, farmers, poets, Lutheran deaconesses, and Catholic priests in a common cause. No section of society was immune to his charm. Even some Jews tried to join the movement in 1933, and the only reason more did not do so is that they were never invited. Millions were eager to die for him, and thousands literally took their own lives when they received news of his death.
   
6. Fanatical racial and ethnic prejudice. While virtually everyone suffers from at least some sort of intolerance, political leaders included, Hitler focused all his hatred on a single group – the Jews – whom he regarded as the “poisoners of humanity” and the sole barrier between himself and his inflated ambitions. (He regarded such phenomena as pacifism, communism, homosexuality, abstract art, atheism, and some aspects of organized Christianity as products of this “spiritual poisoning.”) Moreover, he was willing to deploy the entire resources of the state – in the midst of a war of national survival, no less – in order to root out every last member of this group. He was entirely open about his beliefs. “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord,” he wrote in his best-selling manifesto Mein Kampf. “We are quite clear about the fact that the war can only end with either the eradication of the Aryan peoples or with Judaism disappearing from Europe,” he told his associates in 1942.
   Any serious contender for Hitler status should have at least a few such no-nonsense quotes on hand in his or her file.
7. A neurotic identification with his own people. Hitler believed that he had been chosen by God to embody the very essence of the Germanic peoples and the “Aryan race,” so that if he were defeated in his reach for world domination there would be no point in allowing them to live on after him. Towards the end of the war he issued orders to destroy his country’s entire infrastructure and food supply, and would likely have ordered the extermination of the German people itself if he had had the means to pull it off.
   
   
   
    
   
8. An obsession with art and architecture. Hitler had always regarded himself as an artist and architect and regarded his Third Reich as a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) in the Wagnerian mold. He spent thousands of hours planning the complete reconstruction of Berlin (“Germania”), Nuremberg, and his hometown of Linz. He actually drew the first sketches for the Great Hall, the nine hundred fifty foot tall domed temple of his movement, as early as 1925. He was in such a hurry that he actually pushed to complete his new capital and its victory monuments before the war was won – in fact, he issued the orders before the war even started. He diverted valuable resources to his narcissistic building projects and worked thousands of slave laborers to death to quarry the stone he needed. Towards the end of his life, he personally designed his own monumental tomb in Linz where he hoped to enjoy eternal rest. Before the Germans could start building the new Berlin government district near the Reichstag in the 1990s, they first had to dynamite the foundations of Germania.
   
   
   
    
   
9. Crackpot irresponsibility. Unlike, say, George Washington, who was willing to give things time to develop at a reasonable pace, Hitler insisted on realizing all of his ambitions within his own lifetime regardless of the consequences. He did not just gamble with his country’s economic health and diplomatic position, but with its very physical existence. For him everything was a “roll of the dice.”
   
10. Suicidal determination. Hitler spoke frequently of suicide and nearly killed himself on a number of occasions, including after the fiasco of his “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 and his poor showing in the November 1932 election. His fallback plan for failure during the reoccupation of the Rhineland was to put a bullet through his head. This “secret weapon” made it possible for him to “go to the limit” every time he made a decision. He inevitably hit this limit on April 30, 1945, when he dictated a testament blaming everything on the Jews, then bit on a cyanide capsule and blew his brains out.

I would like to suggest that #10 is decisive. Just about every politician or pundit I have come across is looking forward to enjoying a comfortable retirement complete with a book deal and some quality time with his or her grandchildren. Hitler was a psychopathic cult leader, but politicians and pundits are survivors. Show me another serious national leader whose sole aim in life is to end his life and you’ll have my attention. But if it is only a matter of workaday cruelty and megalomania, it is usually possible to identify some common ground – even if this common ground is merely that of survival.

So how did you make out? I’d say that if your man or woman hits even four or five out of ten, you might have something to talk about at parties. Otherwise, I urge you to choose a different villain to weigh your enemies against. The Hitler comparison is meaningless. In fact, it has become downright embarrassing.