Here we go again. The iconic face of evil, Adolf Hitler, is once again being used as shorthand to disparage with massive overkill things we don't like – in this case, pop star Madonna doesn't like Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. So while she sang a song titled "Get Stupid" during the launch of her latest world tour in Cardiff, Wales, a projected photo montage appeared that included pictures of destruction and global warming, followed by video images of  Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe and Hitler, ending with John McCain. Apparently in Madonna's mind, the last three comprise a rogue's gallery of equivalent offenders to humanity. As she is a student of the Kabala who, on meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres, declared herself an "ambassador for Judaism," we might have hoped Madonna would know better.

It is inappropriate and offensive to make comparisons to the man ultimately responsible for the death of six million Jews and the death and suffering of countless others during the Holocaust. It trivializes the Holocaust and is an insult to the memories of the victims, their families and those who fought Nazism.

But such are not always the calculations of pop stars, media pundits, political officials, and political operatives with axes to grind. An image of Hitler is easy visual short hand – equivalent to the 10 words or less sound-bite – whose symbolic function is to declare a categorical position:  we recognize evil and we associate anyone whose positions with which we disagree with that worst of the worst, that world menace, the Nazi Fuhrer.

This rush to make easy moral comparisons out of one's personal political or ethical biases has been going on for a long time, and as Jews, we are rightly affronted by the Arab media's loose and self-justifying use of Nazi imagery – swastikas, Hitler's mustache, storm trooper caricatures – to defame the state of Israel, its leaders, and the United States' unswerving support for Israel's continued existence as a modern democracy in the midst of authoritarian Arab states.

But these facile, wrong-headed comparisons have also crept into the American political dialogue and our popular mass media with dismaying frequency. And now, in the midst of one of the most important presidential campaigns perhaps since World War II, we are witnessing a quick descent into the kind of "shorthand" dialogue – visual and verbal – whose effect is to stop critical thinking in its tracks. After all, if McCain = Hitler, what more do you have to say? End of story.