White House spokesman Robert Gibbs is worried about Hitler analogies in the health care debate.

Because that sort of thing is divisive.

I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People — imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Here’s the thing: I can kind of imagine people walking around invoking Hitler in opposing Bush and Republicans. Vividly.

For what it’s worth, comparisons of modern leaders to Hitler and/or his Nazi followers are getting pretty old.  At the very least, can we find another historical figure to make hyperbolic allusions to?

Like it or not, Obama is no Hitler.  He’s not planning on blitzkrieging other nations.  He’s not going to try and murder entire swaths of the population in the name of racial purity.

He is, absolutely, a greedy and power hungry politician who wants to silence dissent to the extent that he can while pursuing a political agenda that maximizes the control he and his cronies have over the rest of us.

But that doesn’t make him Hitler.  Just the same sort of greedy, power-hungry politician the world has been dealing with since governments were first invented.  Politicians like Obama are a dime a dozen in the annals of history.  It’s leaders with the humility to know that they don’t have all the answers, and that power is best distributed as much as possible to the people, that are the rarities.