Very often the charge of illegitimacy are raised when the man is not compared with Hitler, or the act is not actually compared to the Holocaust, but merely the principle behind the things criticized. This is itself an illegitimate form of argumentation, it distorts the meaning of the target and then knocks down the strawman.
The practice, even when accurately employed, carries a chilling effect against every impulse which undergirds our support of the First Amendment. That impulse should equally support the right of rich, unfettered expression as well as free expression. To place certain historical events or historical persons out of bounds is to practice a kind of censorship which is to be deplored. We see this today in the treatment of Martin Luther King and it has led us into the tyranny of Barack Obama.
Finally, it is not conventionally regarded to be illegitimate, or at least not nearly so, to equate a person or an event to Stalin or to the Soviet gulags. This is not a healthy or accurate view of history and it is inimical to the health of conservatism for us to accede to the practice. For a number of cultural, demographic, and historical reasons the left has gotten away with telling the world that fascism is much worse than communism. As a result, we have less resistance to emerging leftist tyrants like Barack Obama.
I say, let free expression range free and let inaccurate or hyperbolic statements fall of their own weight but let them be made.
