It is a rule of thumb in contemporary politics that you should not mention Hitler in any context. Democrats and liberals regularly compare Republicans and conservatives with Nazis, but for the GOP, the MSM will make sure it backfires with round-the-clock selective righteous indignation.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s inarticulate invocation of Hitler in the context of Syrian sarin gas attacks was meant to condemn the use of such weapons, the operative word here, in war against civilian or even military targets. As Spicer meant to say, even the evil Hitler never dropped sarin gas bombs on London. The Nazis feared retaliation in kind. Spicer meant to justify our cruise missile retaliation. Spicer is aware of the Holocaust and he millions who perished in the ovens and the gas chambers and in ghoulish medical experiments. He did not mean to excuse these atrocities, but to condemn the Syrian and Russian version.

Spicer’s remarks have met with calls from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the usual liberal suspects for Spicer’s resignation. Yet Pelosi and et al see no problem with embracing the anti-Semitic likes of Al Sharpton, an Obama adviser, or Rep. Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the DNC.

The mainstream media, having failed to derail or even anticipate Donald Trump’s victory, have now seized on attempting to discredit various Team Trump members. They started with one of the architects of his victory, calling Navy veteran, entrepreneur, and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon a “white nationalist.” They cite as evidence some Breitbart headlines designed to provoke and attract readers as being beyond the pale. Compared to what? The New York Times, perhaps?

Publishers don’t necessarily control every jot and tittle of content in their publications, but if one concedes the point of Bannon’s critics, those who have problems with Bannon advising Trump had no problem with race-baiter Al Sharpton serving as advisor to President Obama on, of all things, race relations: As Politico magazine reported:

A few days after 18-year-old Mike Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, White House officials enlisted an unusual source for on-the-ground intelligence amid the chaos and tear gas: the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fiery activist who became a household name by provoking rather than pacifying….

In Ferguson, Sharpton established himself as a de facto contact and conduit for a jittery White House seeking to negotiate a middle ground between meddling and disengagement. “There’s a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office on down,” a White House official familiar with their dealings told me. “He gets it, and he’s got credibility in the community that nobody else has got. There’s really no one else out there who does what he does.”

Let us be grateful for that. If one wanted to send a sane message about justice and peace, Al Sharpton is arguably the worst person to call. He is an instigator, not a peacemaker, someone who rose out of obscurity by propagating the false Tawana Brawley rape case in which New York law enforcement officials were accused of raping a black teenager. As Investor’s Business Daily noted, Tawana Brawley paid for her part in that big lie. Al Sharpton never has.

Sharpton embraced the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra meant to indict racist cops and police departments after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri after he committed a strong-arm robbery on his way to assaulting Officer Darren Wilson. Blessed are the peacemakers, but Al Sharpton is not one of them.

The Sharptons of the world don’t want to solve the real problems of the black community, preferring to exploit back unrest with clueless race-baiting such as when Sharpton and his National Action Network organized

the “Justice for All” march in Washington, D.C. last December:

“You thought you’d sweep it under the rug. You thought there’d be no limelight,” he said. “We are going to keep the light on Michael Brown, on Eric Garner, on Tamir Rice, on all of these victims because the only way — I’m sorry, I come out of the 'hood -- the only way you make roaches run, you got to cut the light on."

As IBD notes, Al Sharpton has made career of anti-Semitic and racial agitation:

Sharpton has made a career of racial incitement. He once called Jews "diamond merchants" and described whites moving businesses into Harlem as "interlopers."

He helped incite three days of anti-Semitic rioting in 1991 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, turning a tragic traffic accident into a riot where two people died and more than 100 were wounded.

Then there was Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem in 1995, subject to the Sharpton campaign to drive out "interlopers." To scare the Jewish owner away, Sharpton turned a tenant-landlord dispute into a racial conflict, resulting in arson of the store and seven deaths.

So the liberal left was okay with Sharpton, but thinks Steve Bannon is a “white nationalist” who threatens all human decency? This comes as the Democratic National Committee considers Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the only Muslim in Congress who has deep ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, for the position of SNC Chairman. As the watchdog group Jihad Watch reports:

Ellison has spoken at a convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Yet ISNA has actually admitted its ties to Hamas, which styles itself the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Justice Department actually classified ISNA among entities “who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”

It gets worse. In 2008, Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.

Also, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) raised large amounts of for Ellison’s first campaign, and he has spoken at numerous CAIR events. Yet CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups.

Nor did the liberal left and the mainstream media, forgive the redundancy, have problems with the curious pasts and associations of Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin. As Investors Business Daily has editorialized:

Abedin also has some interesting family connections. Her father is said to be close with the Saudi government's Muslim World League, and her mother is said to be a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. World Trade Center bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review: "The ties of Ms. Abedin's father, mother and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated."

The Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt with the Obama administration's approval after it had all but abandoned the government of Hosni Mubarak, a long-time ally and friend. It was while Abedin was advising Hillary that State dropped its long-standing policy of having no dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood.

As Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, Huma Abedin’s family and work history suggested a devotion to Islamic supremacist ideology that may go a long way to explaining our imploding Middle East policy from Baghdad to Egypt:

Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

The Democratic Party also had no problem with venerating former KKK member Robert Byrd or with Hillary Clinton’s admiration for Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, whose objective was the extermination of the black race. They are quiet about the racism of the Orwellian-named Black Lives Matter movement or that Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats.

Steve Bannon is not a white nationalist. Sean Spicer is not an anti-Semite. They are patriotic Americans. Their only real crime is getting Donald Trump elected President of the United States.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.