Nazism has become the most convenient and abused metaphor applied to the baddies we don't like. Remember Rush Limbaugh's term 'feminazi' which he popularized in the 90s? As if university feminists were clandestinely stacking gassed bodies of males, heterosexuals, and Christians in the basements of America's colleges.

Saddam Hussein was dubbed a Hitler, but he was a sort of boobish Hitler who could not pull off a single successful occupation. He failed badly in his eight-year attempt to nab a few square miles of Iranian soil, then got abruptly tossed out of Kuwait. He spent the next twelve years under a miserable sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, a murder rate he could not nearly compete with. Bumped from power without even putting up a fight, he got picked out of a spider hole looking like the Arab Walt Whitman. Hitler indeed.

The Arabs have likened Ariel Sharon to Hitler. He and his partisans did a slightly better job of playing the part, occupying land of every single one of Israel's neighbors at least, and relegating the Palestinians to sort-of concentration camps called the Occupied Territories. But the comparison appears strained when we consider the raw numbers.

George W. Bush has been likened to Hitler by some on the left. True, Bush does have a record of invasion and a nasty secret torture prison habit. But he makes a lame Hitler, what with straining at locked doors after press conferences, nearly gagging to death on a pretzel, and struggling to articulate three-syllable words like 'nuclear'.

Osama bin Laden has been dubbed a modern-day Hitler. Bin Laden has no army, no tanks, no missiles. He has killed several thousand people, probably a far leaner portfolio than he would prefer, and did pull off a bold act of mass-murder on live TV, but nonetheless a real amateur by Nazi standards.

That brings us to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, President of Iran, the latest 'Hitler'. Though he talks a good talk, he is off to a slow start. Iran is at present occupying just three parcels of land, the microscopic islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs in a land claim hotly disputed by the United Arab Emirates. Ahmedinejad is going to have to do a far better job of taking down his neighbors if he wants to hold the title. And he's going to have to muster more than the measly teaspoon of poorly-enriched uranium he has at present.

Next time someone waves the flag and sounds the alarm against the 'next Hitler', it would be good to reflect on the real threat the Nazis posed and the real damage they inflicted on the world. The real Hitler invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, England, Russia, and large swathes of the Arab world. He ruled over one of the great technological and industrial juggernauts of the day and mobilized a huge German population towards his aggressive aims. Approximately 20 million people were killed by the Nazis in just over ten years, many of the victims exterminated in vast death camps designed to ethnically cleanse Nazi lands.

All of the aforementioned Hitler pretenders together, George W. Bush and feminazis included, come nowhere near that kind of destruction.

There are no Islamic armies felling nation upon nation to re-establish the Caliphate. Bin Laden, though he serves as a good poster child for Islamo-fascism replete with shaggy beard and bad-guy turban, maintains but a tiny and ineffective following. The Islamist onslaught against the 'civilized' world has taken approximately 4,000 total lives in the last decade. Ugly and wrong, but nothing vaguely like the Nazi threat.

Hitler was Hitler. And while it may satisfy the GI Joe action-figure fantasies of many to think otherwise, the nasties of today's world are not.