Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that town-hall attendees critical of the Democratic health care makeover were “carrying swastikas and symbols like that” to meetings. The next day, Rush Limbaugh responded at length on his radio program, saying, “I have always bristled when I hear people claim that conservatism gets close to Nazism.  It is liberalism that’s the closest you can get to Nazism and socialism.”

On “Meet the Press” this morning, host David Gregory played a brief clip of Limbaugh’s monologue — a sentence in which Limbaugh said, “There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy” — and then asked guest David Brooks to comment.  “I hadn’t seen the Rush Limbaugh thing,” Brooks said.  “That is insane.  What he’s saying is insane.”