The fact that Republicans (and Limbaugh "conservatives") routinely use the language of "good" and "evil" does not, for me, mean that the words "good" and "evil" have no meaning, or that they shouldn't ever be used. (Of course, they shouldn't be used as a substitute for reasoned debate, but that's hardly the same thing as discarding the words and ideas altogether.) Similarly, the fact that a lot of bigoted, scary neocons like to talk about "morality" doesn't mean that morality has no meaning for me, or that it's necessarily discrediting to talk about the issues of the day in terms of moral right and wrong.

Bush's personal motives have never interested me. (For that matter -- and maybe this is a sign of my incuriosity -- Hitler's subjective experience has never much interested me, in part because I suspect that his thoughts, emotions, and "motivations" were very banal. Martin Amis's underrated book "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million" does a magnificent job of writing interestingly and insightfully about Stalin's banality.)

I rarely hear any of my friends speculating about Bush's motives either. ("Greed," I agree, is a facile explanation. For one thing, these people already have more money than their great-great-great grandchildren will ever be able to spend.) What's more interesting to me is why the American voting public (with the mainstream news media) has responded to Bush's policies and rhetoric in the dismal way that they have. I'm interested in finding out whether and how this country can withstand the next 9/11, the next Bush presidency -- how this country can do better next time, and what role, if any, I'll be able to play in preventing another catastrophe. (I marched in antiwar protests in the months before Iraq was invaded. I don't think that did any good. On the other hand, I did register several of my friends to vote. Maybe that was helpful. I don't know.)

Anyway. As long as we're talking about reductive caricatures: I take issue with the idea, offered in an earlier comment, that people who regard George Bush as "evil" are necessarily the same kinds of people who "idealize" Bill Clinton, or that we're not meaningfully different from the "values Republicans" who idealize Bush and regard Democrats as "evil."

I never hated any Republican president (or, honestly, any American politician) before George W. Bush. (Of course, I was frustrated with Reagan -- and, at times, with Bush Sr. -- and regularly angry at, or disgusted with, the Republican Congressional majority . . . but these felt, to me, like strong political differences, not fundamental moral or ideological differences.) It would have been fair to describe me, in 2000, as a moderate Democrat; most of my heated arguments were with friends whose politics were to my left: the Nader voters.

I was deeply frustrated with Clinton -- with his political clumsiness after first taking office, with his later willingness to "compromise" where compromise was inappropriate, etc.

I don't think I'm "afraid of complexity" (although I agree with much of what Glenn has said here about the appeal of "good vs. evil" rhetoric). At the same time, I think that if Bush -- Bush individually, and "Bush" as a movement or political idea -- isn't evil, then nothing is evil. The word doesn't have any practical meaning. And I doubt whether it will help moderates or leftists -- "reasonable people" -- to carve out a position as the group that doesn't believe in any absolute truths, that's "uncomfortable" with words like "right" and "wrong."

In other words, I question the wisdom of "unilaterally disarming" by scoffing at the notion that anything is "evil," or that resisting "evil" can play a helpful role in the life of our country. Phrased another way: cultural myths have value. Until the last few years, for instance, I think most people would have responded -- not only for themselves, but also in "speaking for America" -- that torture was evil, that kidnapping was evil, that invading and destroying foreign countries that posed no threat to us was evil . . . that tyranny was evil. Now, we're at a point where even these seemingly fundamental questions: "Are torture and murder evil?" are open to debate. And beginning our response to these questions by saying "let's get past these ideas of good and evil . . ." seems likelier to help the side that wants to engage in torture, official abduction, and murder. (Excising morality from public debate will open up a lot of exciting new possibilities for leaders like Bush.)

"Good," "evil," "right," "wrong" -- I'm not uncomfortable with those words; I think I have some sense of what they mean. And a word like "evil" -- like "love," perhaps -- captures something that no other word can express in quite the same way.

I don't know what motivates Bush, but as far as I'm concerned, he is evil -- he stands, whatever his subjective motivations might be, for the bad in the world -- and it may be healthy for our country (which has never been one, and never will be one, to embrace multiply-layered ambiguity and complexity) to think of him that way, if that's what's needed to purge him from our collective "soul."

I guess this whole longwinded, clumsy response is just to say, to Glenn: don't be so disgusted with leftists (and Salon message-board commenters) who, like the Limbaugh conservatives, are tempted to impose a (necessarily subjective) moral order on things -- who need, for whatever reason, to conceptualize certain things (and I'm not just talking about torture and mass slaughter here, but also about indifference, like Bush's, to torture and mass slaughter) as "evil," and are comforted to hear others do the same. I agree that a public debate that centers on concepts of "good" and "evil" is a broken debate, but that doesn't mean that people should be ridiculed for denouncing a torturer as evil.