You quote her on the “I’m going to call it what it is” line, but ignore her very next sentence: “If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig.” Unless she’s actually a fashion designer for pigs, this sentence tells me that: 1) she’s using figurative language at this point; and 2) she’s not very good at using figurative language, because that metaphor sucks!

You may call it sniggling over language, but I think her story loses a lot of credibility when she uses words like that. If she tells it like this, how are we supposed to know how bad it actually was?

When somebody says, “My drive home was a nightmare,” you don’t correct them by asking how they could have possibly been driving while asleep.

When somebody says, “My wife’s going to kill me for coming home late,” you don’t offer to call the police to prevent a potential homicide.

When somebody is on a losing softball team, and they say, “I feel like I’m on the Titanic,” you don’t point out that they’re in the middle of a baseball field and not literally on a sinking ship.

It’s analogy. It’s exaggeration. Is it politically incorrect? Probably. But there’s a good chance that, as you say, this woman “needs a history lesson” that she never received. She may not realize she’s devaluing anything. But I can guarantee that the Florida Republican knew exactly what HE was doing. And it had nothing to do with being outraged by a “concentration camp” analogy.

Want to throw somebody off during a debate about something? Correct them when they pronounce a word wrong — it makes them feel stupid, puts them on the defensive, and shakes their focus on the topic at hand.

Having said all that, Ivon, I agree that WW2 references are too often used. But for better or worse, Hitler, the Holocaust, and concentration camps are part of the human vocabulary now. I say it’s better to remember these horrible concepts and reference them inappropriately than to forget them entirely and risk having humanity repeat them. And if comparing Guantanamo or that stadium in New Orleans to a “concentration camp” decreases the odds that we repeat such acts of inhumanity like that ever again, I’m more than willing to let people overexaggerate.

Just telling what actually happened would paint a better picture than comparing it to a concentration camp.