17.2.04

QUOTE: A very nice post on the use of 'evil' to describe political figures:

"The other obvious problem with a liberal who says Bush is evil or a conservative who says Clinton is evil is that they’re denying their capacity to make broader judgments about the existence of evil. If Bush is “evil,” for example, then is Saddam Hussein “double-plus evil”? Do you take the more cynical calculation that there’s no difference between Bush and Saddam? Or do you take the tack chosen by the Ramsey Clarks of the world that anyone opposed by “evil” is automatically good? (This is the rationale Clark, who believes that every American President is evil, used to justify defending Milosevic and the Rwandan genocidaires.) Once you start down the road of “good” and “evil” in American politics, you wind up with either a pretty bizarre set of values, no internal consistency, or both."

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