Matt Yglesias employs an odd new version of argument ad Hitlerum in a column for the advocacy group the Center for American Progress titled “The Return of the ‘Stab in the Back.’” He says the critics of the press’s one-sided coverage of American setbacks in Iraq are laying the groundwork for “a new version of the ’stab in the back’ myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany”:

No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn’t working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It’s an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.

Talk about ugly tactics. Who, exactly, employed the “stabbed in the back” theory to such success? Hmmm, let’s see. Oh, I know: The Nazis. Hitler rose to power through his harrangues against the “Traitors of 1918″ who denied Germany its rightful victory. He was more closely associated with this peerspective in the 1920s than he was any other, including perhaps anti-Semitism. But Yglesias certainly knows this, why else draw the analogy? And in order to make his ludicrous analogy work he needs to flesh out a few more similarities. So, in that spirit, he conjures a bizarre and unfair suggestion that media critics like Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) will unleash their Brownshirts and foment mob violence against the new Traitors of 2004 if they don’t support this great patriotic war. Reynolds ably defends himself here. Obviously the comparison is sloppy history at best and atypically cheap shot at worst. Hitler wasn’t scapegoating the press, not even the “Jew-run press.” He was blaming the men who signed onto a bad peace deal and ended the war without honor. He was certainly right that it was a bad peace deal, if for no other reason than it created the conditions for his rise to power. But that’s all too complicated and inconvenient for Yglesias’ shoddy analogy.

Yglesias offers some other strange points in his essay, including his suggestion that it was the press’ excess of patriotic fervor which drove the faulty coverage leading up to the war. But it’s his — granted, novel — invocation of the “our enemies are Nazis” nonsense that is so disappointing and perhaps revealing. At least the Vietnam analogy, so flawed in so many ways, would be far more apt here. Yes, many of us are blaming the media for a host of transgressions. But we are not plotting a Nazi coup and Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.