See, the murder of 6 million Jews at the direction of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is more horrific than anything you could be comparing it to. There's absolutely nothing in modern American life that comes close to approximating the Holocaust. Period. End of discussion.

And yet, politicians just keep breaking that rule.

The latest entrant is Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who decided it would be a good idea to suggest that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended Nazis in court.

"You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis," Cotton said in a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday. "This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them."

THE POINT -- NOW ON YOUTUBE! In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe! Cotton was referencing Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was appointed by President Harry Truman to oversee the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg in the aftermath of World War II. And Cotton was criticizing Jackson for representing several Guantanamo Bay prisoners as a public defender in the mid-2000s. ("Federal public defenders don't get to pick their clients," Jackson said during her confirmation hearings. You can see the gears in Cotton's head moving here. See, Robert Jackson and Ketanji Brown Jackson have the same last name! And they both are on the Supreme Court -- or are about to be! So making a comparison between how one Judge Jackson prosecuted the Nazis and how another defended four Guantanamo Bay prisoners will be a rhetorical slam dunk! Which, well, no. See -- because I can't say this enough times -- there is simply nothing in modern life, including Guantanamo Bay prisoners, that stand up in a direct comparison to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Because this is 2022, Cotton didn't apologize for drawing the comparison. Instead he leaned into it. "Judge Jackson voluntarily represented three terrorists in three cases," Cotton told CNN's Manu Raju Wednesday. "And she called American soldiers war criminals. I have no patience for it." (A CNN fact check found that Jackson did not explicitly call American soldiers "war criminals.") None of these facts will get in the way of Cotton stoking the conservative outrage machine. And because of the current state of the Republican Party, there's close to zero percent chance that any GOP leader will call on Cotton to take back his gross comparison. But none of that changes this fact: No politician should EVER compare ANYTHING to the Nazis and the Holocaust. It fails every single time.

Source: CNN

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