Can we put a moratorium on Hillary Clinton using a poem about the Holocaust to talk about free trade and outsourcing? Talk about inappropriate metaphors…

At the union hall in Gary, she grew so animated in describing the plight of old-line industrial workers that she described them in language from the oft-repeated poem, attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemoller, about the victims of Nazism. “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist,” goes the version inscribed on a wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After coming for the trade unionists, it continues, “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.”

In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.”

PS: This paragraph from the same story is a classic example of the bogus psychodrama of contemporary campaign reporting:

Since the race started, Mrs. Clinton has cycled through several political personas: the battle-tested White House veteran, the fighter, the girl — her word — tougher than any boy. Now she is the Dream Boss: the one who will give you a job and provide health insurance, but also understand just how hard you work and the mundane details of what you do.

Note the symmetry with the descriptions of different Al Gore “personas” in 2000 and ask yourself when you heard George W. Bush or John McCain characterized in this way.