I've never been comfortable using the word "evil." It's too simple for what it describes, too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Dracula is evil, the devil is evil, Lex Luthor is evil. In children's stories, evil does evil for the sake of evil. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't describe anything that happens in the real world. When someone uses the word, it goes straight to the part of my brain that detects ridiculousness. When George W. Bush talks about "evildoers," the first thing I think of is Cesar Romero as "The Joker" on Batman. Evil has become a word to describe either impossible supernatural creatures or absurd criminals who steal diamond encrusted jack-in-the-boxes.
For me, evil is a word to be used sparingly -- the word has already been abused into near meaninglessness, I don't want to further the erosion. As a result, when I do use the word, I'm either using it correctly (about 10% of the time) or as comic hyperbole ("According to Jim is a horrific evil that must be erased from human history").
Now is one of the 10% of times. When I say evil, I mean evil. Because torture is evil. Don't agree with that? How about this? Torturing children is evil. Agreed? How about people who "you could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" about ways to torture people?
Now that we're all on the same page -- excepting, of course, the deluded and the genuinely evil -- let's look at evil in America today.
Let's look at the Bush administration...
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