ALL right, everybody, cool it with the Hitler analogies. Comparing elected officials and law-enforcement officers here in the United States to the most evil man in human history and the storm troopers who carried out his will is disgusting, tasteless, inappropriate and improper. Such comparisons are not only a libel on those who are unjustly likened to Adolf Hitler; they belittle the enormity of the Holocaust and the sacrifices made by millions of servicemen to bring his incarnadine reign to an end.

But those very same analogies were everywhere in evidence this weekend as Americans reacted with outrage to the raid on Lazaro Gonzalez’s house. “I thought that this was only possible in Hitler’s Germany,” said Cuban-American activist Ramon Saul Sanchez. “This is America, not Cuba or Hitler’s Nazi Germany,” said Miami Mayor Joe Carollo. Throughout the weekend, signs held up by crowds in Miami read “Clinton=Hitler” and “Janet Reno Sieg Heil.”

The outrage caused by the 5 a.m. raid and the infamous photograph of the federal marshal brandishing his assault rifle at Elian Gonzalez and his savior, fisherman Donato Dalrymple, is entirely understandable. The Clinton administration chose to use American law-enforcement officers to further the propaganda aims of Fidel Castro, knowing full well that in the past few weeks the Cuban dictator has made clear his intention to take custody of Elian Gonzalez away from his father, Juan Miguel, and house the boy in a Havana reeducation facility far from his father’s home in Cardenas.

It could have been different. The administration’s actions in this matter were entirely discretionary – which is to say, the decision to take an active role in reuniting Elian with Juan Miguel by using marshals and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents was not a matter of law but a matter of choice.

The government of the United States had no reason to twist itself into a pretzel doing the bidding of Fidel Castro. But whatever Clinton and Janet Reno did, it does not merit comparison with Nazi Germany. Or with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Or with Castro’s Cuba. In those countries, the house would have been raided and everybody in it shot. Or arrested and taken to prison for defying the government. Or worked to death in a concentration camp.

Time was that such analogies were the exclusive province of the America-hating Left. “Amerika,” they called this country during the Vietnam era, and did things like convene a Nuremberg-like war-crimes tribunal to find the United States guilty of supposed crimes against humanity for fighting against the totalitarian threat to humanity posed by the USSR and its satellites.

More recently, right here in New York, the leftist enemies of Rudy Giuliani have disgraced themselves with their repulsive renderings of the mayor wearing a Hitler moustache. It was, therefore, profoundly unfortunate that Giuliani himself would stoop to using such an analogy himself by calling the federal marshals who staged the raid on Lazaro Gonzalez’s house “storm troopers.”

Ever since the waning days of the Cold War, the Right has gotten in on the Nazi-analogy action. It began in 1990, when conservative opponents of the Gulf War organized themselves into a group they charmingly called “the Committee to Avert a Mideast Holocaust.”

Matters worsened immeasurably when Bill Clinton took office. In 1995, after botched raids in Waco and Ruby Ridge cost scores of lives, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association sent out a fund-raising letter in which he called agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “jackbooted thugs … wearing Nazi bucket helmets and storm trooper uniforms.” That slander caused former President George Bush to resign his lifetime NRA membership.

On Sunday, Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) said much the same thing about the officers and marshals who raided the Gonzalez house. Wrong. They were just doing the job with which they had been tasked – to remove Elian from the premises quickly and safely – and they did what they had to do. The choice was Bill Clinton’s, not theirs.

The president and the Democrats think they may have scored a political success with their raid. Fine. They will also have to suffer the consequences that will result from a reunified Republican base, bound by the anti-Communist glue that held the conservative movement together for 40 years.

But Republicans and conservatives have to be careful as well, because their reckless use of the Nazi analogy will give Democrats an opportunity to sound more responsible than Republicans. Al Gore can follow Hillary Clinton’s example – she took Giuliani to task for his “storm trooper” remark – by getting to the right of the Right, scoring GOP leaders for what he can deem their anti-Americanism.

What shall it profit a party if it gain Florida but lose the nation?

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com