"I sit in front of a decision like that and I say this is a decision where somebody sat down to figure out how much evil they could get away with".
Determining that "this is a decision where somebody sat down to figure out how much evil they could get away with" is clearly (or at a minimum, a very strong implication) that the person is evil. I imagine one could parse their way out of it if they were really motivated, but it sounds pretty definitive to me.
Did he not say this? Was he not talking about President Bush?
I'm comparativley new to FReep but it seems to me a public statement on a public forum is an invitation for all to respond. I'm grateful for your response.
Again, as I said on another thread, when someone runs a red light, he is figuring out how much evil he can get away with -- and I wouldn't say the light-runner was an evil person.
The well has been poisoned. If I write how it looks to me it will be(and has already been) suggested that I am being Clintonoid or condescending. That kind of thing works to stop discussion but seems to me also to render discussion useless.
My personal take on that part of that speech was that the diction was ill-advised. Keyes went too directly (IMHO) for a kind of clarity and ended up laying himself open for the kind of misconstruction we're talking about now.
(In this connection I agree with the poster who said it would have been good if, in the article this thread is about, Keyes could have put in something like "As the President has said ..." to clarify that he was agreeing in this instance. I sure wish he had. I think he should be looking for opportunities to state explicitly when he agrees with soemthing the President has done. Like Keyes would care what I think.)
Anyway, in my training as a (now former) clergyman I was accustmed to use the term "evil" enough that it lost its "thrill". It became a, how shall I say it, technical term. Like "virtue" and "vice", which in common speech are almost comic terms, but in (at least some) discussions of ethics and whatnot are, again, technical terms.
So maybe I'm reasoning ahead of my data but I think Keyes was using the word "evil" that way and ill-advisedly forgot that it's a word which has such a penumbra that it, well, leads to the kind of reaction we see here.
He gets a big "poor choice of words" in my report card, anyway
But at least when I read that sentence it did not occur to me, really, that he was calling the President evil. I was focussed on the deed in question (the ESCR stuff) and did not and still do not) see the implication you find there.
Sorry if I'm not being clear. The caffeine has not reached my alleged brain yet.