The first thousand times I saw Adolf Hitler shout “Nine! Nine! Nine! Nine! Nine!” followed by Brad Pitt’s “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!” during TV commercials for Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi-killing summer blockbuster Inglourious Basterds, I didn’t even notice that “Bastards” is spelled wrong and that “Inglorious” has an extra “u”. The second thousand times I saw the trailer for the still unrated movie, I started fantasizing about going into the Tarantino killing business. I’m well into my third thousandth viewing of this movie ad, which ranges from 30 seconds to two minutes depending on whether you’re watching cable or commercial TV or the Internet, and the disturbing thing is that I’m bound to see it at least 5K times before this movie opens in theaters on August 21. It’s everywhere, this trailer. And the more I see the trailer the less I want to see the movie.

Not that I’m against killin’ Nazis. I love the premise. I just don’t want to be killin’ Nazis every time I want to watch an on-demand episode from season two of Mad Men. Killin’ Nazis is a perfectly fine way to kill off the waning days of August, but the fact is I’ve been watching Nazi killer movie trailers all summer long. It’s like having every TV channel I turn on be a floating combination of Comedy Central and the History Channel. Not even Shark Week promos are as ubiquitous as this Summer of Killin’ Nazis.

And by “killin'” Nazis I mean Vlad the Impaler style executions. The trailers for Inglourious Basterds make clear that this is one big happy bloodbath in which evil gets its throat slit while its family watches. “We will be cruel to the German and through our cruelty they will know who we are,” says Brad Pitt, commander of the all-volunteer psycho Jewboy American army commandos who are expected to go medieval on Wehrmacht soldiers. “They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered and disfigured bodies of their brothers that we leave behind.”

Did I mention that this is the feel good movie of the summer?

“The German will be sickened by us,” Pitt continues. “The German will talk about us. And the German will fear us.” Then to leave no doubt as to the commander’s expectations for his men, Pitt says, “Each man in my company owes me one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps!”

And all this is in a single trailer.

This would all be so funny if I hadn’t seen Brad Pitt in a movie called Legends of the Fall in which he plays an American fighting for a Canadian regiment in World War One, who, after losing his younger brother to a German machine gun, mounts a savage one-man campaign across enemy lines in the dark with a knife and returns back in camp blood covered at dawn riding a horse with dozens of German scalps hanging from his belt.

Legends of the Fall, like A River Runs Through It, is one of Brad Pitt’s great performances. I’m sure he’s great in Inglourious Basterds, but I’m in no hurry to see him in this mad romp through Nazi follicles. I’m always suspicious of a movie that I can’t avoid on TV commercials everyday for three months before it opens. Beyond that, this movie is so off the charts in the Political Correctness Richter scale. I know that all Germans weren’t Nazis, but 99 percent of Nazis were German. If this was a movie about killin’ Al Queda or killin’ the Taliban with the same ferocity and blood lust as what is aimed at the Nazis, there would be a sizable outcry from critics who would fear that the movie is motivated by stealth racism. This movie is really about killin’ Ay-rabs or killin’ Muslims.

Oddly, in a country where Germans represent the largest single ethnic group — more than Irish, more than English, more than Italians, more than blacks, more than Hispanics (of 300 and some million Americans, more than 50 million claim German ancestry) — there hasn’t been the predictable outcry from a maligned ethnic constituency. Evidently, nobody takes Nazis personally.

“Nazi ain’t got no humanity,” Brad Pitt declares in Inglourious Basterds. “They got to be destroyed.”

Not to put too fine a point on my uneasiness about universal Nazi bashing. . . this week Rush Limbaugh compared Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Adolf Hitler. And to think she didn’t even start an illegal war against a foreign country based on trumped up intelligence and outright lies.

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