From the party that added "you lie!" and "baby killer!" to America's political lexicon, now Republicans are ratcheting up the rhetoric about Iran's nuclear ambitions with alarmist talk of a "second Holocaust."
No longer is it enough to warn of the dangers of nuclear proliferation and to seek strategies short of war that might dissuade Iran from becoming the 10th member of the nuclear club.
Now Republicans feel it necessary to equate Iran with Nazi Germany and to suggest that anyone who sees shades of gray is an appeaser and genocide enabler.
Sen. John McCain may have been the first out of the gate with the incendiary language. During the 2008 campaign, he went on Israeli TV and said, "I have to look you in the eye and tell you that the United States of America can never allow a second Holocaust."
Unhelpful analogy
Then, a couple of months ago, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, asserted that "the Iranian regime is dedicated to creating a second Holocaust in terms of wanting to annihilate Israel."
And more recently, Sarah Palin, no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric, posted on Facebook that "Iran's leaders have repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, and with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, the mullahs would be in a position to launch a second Holocaust."
You don't have to be a Republican, of course, to connect Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scorn for Israel to the possibility that he might want to incinerate the Jewish state. If there's an issue that unifies Americans, it's preventing nuclear war.
But what's troubling with the Republican hard line is it states the obvious and undeniable challenge of dealing with Iran's radical leadership in the starkest terms possible, while it fails to contribute to prospects for a bloodless solution.
If the only truth you'll accept is that Ahmadinejad is Hitler's disciple, then you've already convinced yourself that he can't be checked by diplomacy, sanctions, treaties, inspections and so forth.
You limit your options to more and more dire warnings, threats of massive strikes if Iran closes in on developing a bomb and, ultimately, carrying out those threats — the costs and repercussions be damned.
Options open
But experts like Trita Parsi, who spoke at Franklin & Marshall College last week, say it would be a mistake to think diplomacy and international pressure are futile.
In a lecture and interview, Parsi, a scholar and president of the National Iranian American Council, made the case that, poisonous remarks notwithstanding, Iran and Israel are engaged in a strategic, not ideological, contest that can be resolved without war.
Parsi told me he believes Israeli leaders consider a nuclear Iran more of a hindrance to Israel's "strategic maneuverability" than a threat to its existence.
It's Iran, after all, not Israel, that faces annihilation in a nuclear exchange, Parsi said, as Israel possesses more than 200 nuclear weapons, some of which are launchable from stealthy submarines.
The calculation to preempt a nuclear Iran, then, shouldn't be based on a belief that a second Holocaust will follow Iran's acquiring the bomb just as winter follows fall.
The peril of Iran's nuclear envy can best be confronted if thinking isn't clouded by hyped-up fear.
Time, Parsi believes, is still on the side of "less sexy but nonetheless more realistic and effective" ways of showing Iran the folly of building a bomb.