Once upon a time only dwellers in the hard-left Internet fever swamps would compare the President or Vice President to Adolf Hitler or some other unquestionably evil leader. But political discourse in America has descended to the point where you can now open up of one of the nation's most influential papers and see one of their regular columnists casually drawing a moral comparison between the sitting Vice President of the United States and the current President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is what the New York Times' Nick Kristof did this morning:

The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.

Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness -- and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.

Mind you, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on record describing the Holocaust as "a myth," and calling for Israel "to be wiped off the map" and "annihilated." Apparently to Kristof and NY Times crowd this is on the same moral plane with policy differences over:

-- whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq.

-- whether the U.S. should continue to fight in Iraq.

-- whether the U.S. should keep Guantanamo open.

-- whether the government should have cut the capital gains tax rate.

-- whether John Roberts and Sam Alito are good justices.

-- and on and on and on......

What I find striking is the intensity of the raw hatred directed toward Cheney, and in this case it's led Nick Kristof into an intellectual wilderness, because to make this comparison Kristof must either believe that Cheney is evil, or Ahmadinejad is not. I suspect the reason Kristof can so casually make the comparison between Cheney and Ahmadinejad is because in Kristof's mind the Vice President's policies have literally come to represent evil. Still, I'd be curious to hear Kristof answer the question point blank: does he believe Cheney is truly evil and who does he think is a larger threat to the world?