In a country that spends more than $30 billion on its pets each year and gets all misty-eyed over “Old Yeller,” you really have to be an idiot to make affection for animals offensive. But that’s what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has done again, with their designed-to-shock traveling summer exhibit “Are Animals the New Slaves?”

By showing graphic pictures of lynchings and slavery alongside images of animals, the organization has unleashed a firestorm of bipartisan fury, while furthering one of the worst characteristics of this hyper-partisan era, the hateful hyperbole that threatens to make Holocaust, Nazi, and slavery comparisons a normal part of knee-jerk political discourse.

The 10-week, 42-city summer tour hit a snag last week when it touched down in New Haven. I’ve spent my time in the Elm City, and the overeducated folks there are generally far too “sophisticated” to be offended by much from the far-left, but the tone-deaf press release offered by PETA should have offered a hint of the controversy to come: “Just as it is still considered acceptable for circuses to deprive elephants and other animals of their freedom and parade them before cheering crowds before forcing them to perform out of fear of punishment, it was once considered acceptable to lock up the African survivors of the slave ship Amistad in the New Haven Jail and charge people 12-and-a-half cents apiece to gawk at them.”

The circus and slavery are on two very different sides of the ethical spectrum, and not surprisingly, those whose ancestors were being compared to circus animals were not thrilled about the comparison. The president of the state and local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Scot X. Esdaile, led a protest of the exhibit exclaiming within earshot of a reporter from the New Haven Register, “Once again, black people are being pimped. You used us. You have used us enough … Take it down immediately.” The Register reported that another person upset by the exhibit, Michael Perkins, shouted, “I am a black man! I can’t compare the suffering of these black human beings to the suffering of this cow.”

I viewed the exhibit online – you can, too, at www.peta.org/AnimalLiberation/display.asp. It promises to offer a “thought-provoking” experience. Instead, I found a slide show of remarkable insensitivity to human suffering, all presented over the strains of a synthesized violin.

Images of families being tearfully separated at slave auctions are juxtaposed side-by-side with a photo from a cattle auction; the overcrowded human contents of slave ships are compared to sheep streaming off a modern carrier; the hanging remnants of a bloodied human being after a lynching is compared to a cow in the slaughterhouse. I called PETA looking for comment and clarification, and the question I asked into their answering machine highlighted the absurdity: “I’m calling to ask if the images of the chickens in flames next to the picture of the charred human carcass is the result of the avian-flu epidemic or some Perdue harvesting procedure?”

It is not the first time that PETA has intentionally headed toward controversy. Just this past May – on Holocaust Remembrance Day – they reluctantly apologized for a 2003 campaign titled “Holocaust on Your Plate,” which displayed side-by-side photos of children behind the bars of a concentration camp and pigs kept in a cramped pen, as well as a starved man next to an image of an emaciated cow.

Beyond the world of PETA, idiotically inappropriate Holocaust and Nazi comparisons have become quite popular recently: Protest signs comparing President Bush to Hitler were as commonplace as they were counterproductive during the past campaign. In the Senate, Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin was roundly criticized when he compared the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with concentration camp victims. Among the most outraged critics was Senator Santorum, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, who then turned around months later to condemn the centrist bipartisan effort to stop the imposition of the so-called “nuclear-option” over judges by nonsensically saying that it was “the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.’ “Both Senators Santorum and Durbin later apologized, but each comparison had its own defenders on the cheerleading benches of the far right and far left.

Each of these attacks uses the extremist strategy of gaining attention by making outrageous comparisons, but they also share the downside of making potential supporters reluctant to associate themselves with their actions. PETA recently announced it would briefly suspend its animal-slavery exhibit tour to consider reaction – which its spokesman insists has been “mostly positive” – but even in the uncharacteristic event that they end the tour after a dozen appearances, the damage has been done. They have already alienated many more people than they won over and, in the process, diminished their influence and empowered their opponents by presenting a stereotype of the out-of-touch insanity of the fringe far-left, which in turn will be used to tar the Democratic Party.

Comparing any contemporary domestic political conflict to the Nazis, the Holocaust, or slavery diminishes the seriousness of the argument and demeans the suffering of the real life victims. The Holocaust is the Holocaust. Slavery is slavery. Hitler is Hitler. Crimes against humanity should not be casually used to maximize political effect. Such tactics are shameless in their lack of perspective: idiotic, offensive, and ultimately counterproductive.