[sinkspur]

Did Keyes really call Bush "evil"?

He did.

Keyes said Bush's decision was more damaging than anything that Bill Clinton, often called the villain of the right, could have done.

"The evil that you know, the evil that inspires you to fight again is not the worst evil," Keyes said.

"The worst evil creeps behind your lines and dominates your leadership."

Source .

[Howlin]

Now, I think you all have to ask yourselves, when you see somebody agonizing about something that's clear and making a decision they are under no particular pressure to make, where the facts don't bear out your opponents and yet, at the end of the day, they come down with a view that crosses the line between complicity and principle, they didn't do that because they were forced to it. See, my problem is that 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. Now, I know, my friends, that after many years of Bill Clinton we may have lowered our standards to such an extent that all we care about is this, this evil [we've avoided]. That's not what built this country.

[NittanyLion]

Thanks for the source. I think Keyes meant it in the metaphorical sense (slightly better than directly calling Bush "evil"), but that's still pretty inexcusable rhetoric.