Smearing a politician is just too easy these days. It used to be that journalists had certain standards, that comparing a politician to Josef Stalin or Hitler or to any mass murdering thug just wasn't done. It was seen even by partisans as unfair.

My how times have changed:

Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth? 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.

“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”