Evil

Rich Lowry wonders,

What is it about the word “evil” that so offends the Left?

It smacks of a religious worldview that makes secularists uncomfortable. It sets up a natural opposition between good and evil — what experts dissecting Bush called a “binary discourse” — that is altogether too confident in our own virtue, according to the Left. It doesn’t necessarily entail any particular policy response, but it tilts toward a total commitment to fighting the enemy, since a campaign to “degrade” evil feels inherently inadequate.

If Bush was ill-served at times by his stubbornness and certainty, it’s always worth remembering that Democrats were perfectly content to lose to al-Qaeda in Iraq when Bush was ordering the surge in 2007, and Obama’s insistence on pulling out of Iraq entirely was a priceless boon to the Islamic State.

Obama was allegedly the embodiment of a wholly different approach than Bush, much more nuanced than his predecessor and his embarrassing nomenclature of “evil.” Yet Obama’s doubts were more about the usefulness and goodness of American power than about his own purposes. He pursued the “end” of the Bush-era wars at all costs, regardless of the depravity of the forces on the ground who would benefit.

We were supposed to be beyond good versus evil, although the other side didn’t get the memo and never left the field. It’s almost as if the greatest trick evil ever played was persuading the Left not to call it by its proper name.

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