At the risk of sounding insensitive to the victims of these horrible acts, I am finding that the Rhetoric from the whitehouse is starting to sound a little silly.
Calling the terrorists “evil doers” and Thugs or Bin Laden as the “Evil one” seems almost to turn these people into cartoon supervillians.
What they did was despicable and evil however I believe that to reduce them into two dimensional characters we make the mistake of not trying to understand these people. Once you know your enemy you can defeat them. Or Am I just being too critical?
I think the administration is just trying to send a “words of one syllable” message not only to Americans, but also to the rest of the world, to the effect that there are no gray areas here, that we’re not willing to “deal”, to “rationalize”, to “get these people some help” instead of sending in the 10th Mountain Division to slam them up against the wall.
They’re especially trying to get the word out to the Islamic world that what these people did was really really bad, and that that’s why we’re bombing Afghanistan–it’s not merely out of a misplaced and badly outdated Yankee running dog imperialism. It’s hard to misconstrue or mistranslate the word “evil”.
I agree with you, sometimes it sounds a little odd; but that because we are so used to seeing evil acts “explained” as DDG says. We’re become conditioned to dismiss the ideas of right and wrong.
It’s also an intentional rhetoric designed to galvanize support. It puts the appeasement crowd on the defensive. Do they say either:
“They’re not evil” – who would believe them?
or
“They’re evil but we shouldn’t kill them.” – which makes them look like cowards.
It does make the terrorists sound like supervillians.
Then again, they’re acting like supervillians. Before Sept. 11, the only place you could see such acts of elaborate, visually spectacular, stupendously evil, and ultimately pointless violence was in the comics or the movies. No wonder the president and the media are drawing their vocabulary from the pulps.
