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Didn't Churchill say something along the lines of "if Hitler managed to attack the very gates of hell, I would try to think of something supportive to say about the devil"?
Perhaps there's something even more evil than Nazis loose on the earth theses days :-(

I don't know what Churchill might have said. But, he was a moral equivocator sometimes.
The THEORY is that in war, enemies and friends sometimes blur in the heat of moral equivalency.

Prime example of U.S. moral equivlancy, that is, backing a monster because it was convenient (Jimmy Carter foreign policy, continued by Reagan):
The U.S. back the monster Sadaam Hussein against Iran. The U.S. knew full well what a monster Hussein was and were reminded of it by every Arab nation in the area. But, the U.S. wanted to get Iran more.
Result: after 9 years of fruitless support, both financial, moral and armaments, Iraq won not one inch of Iranian land and had to sue for peace.
Iran was the hero nation of Islam because they fought U.S.-back, supported, financed and armed Iraq....and beat back the Butcher of Baghdad. That has ALWAYS been Sadaam's nickname, way back from the 1970's.

Worse than Hitler? Oh yes. Stalin was worse, only because he had MUCH more time.
Worse than Stalin? Oh yes. Mao was worse. He wins the title of most people killed, tortured, imprisoned, experimented on, massed graved, etc.

In those two countries, you saw evil personified. The DIDN'T do it all alone, either. Sad thing: Mao is still a HERO in his country. How warped is that?

Usama bin Laden and Al-Qaida are evil too but they simply don't have the numbers ... yet. They need several tens of millions to kill, torture, imprison, experiment on, etc., to catch up to Stalin or Mao. They won't catch up with them, of course, because they aren't nations, are just individuals, have no national armies and incur the anger of their own.
bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship years ago and awaits a head-chopping if he ever goes home. No one will take him in....except, of course, Afghanistan and Pakistan, both Muslim nations....neither of which are Arab countries.

That's a very intelligible answer to something that has bothered me about a lot of modern history. In your thoughtful opinion, where should the US stand vis-a-vis Putin? Yeltsin, who is held up by the State Department as the creator of the freedoms that Putin supposedly tramples, shot up parliament and had no problems arresting dissenters, unlike Putin who lets them spin their wheels in the courts.

The 'Putin is bringing back the USSR' crowd maintain that behind all our enemies stands a Russian. The 'Putinists' regard him as the least evil of a whole lot of evils, which in essence summarize Russian history.

Looking forward to your reply :-)