Demagogue

Even weeks after his "commentator for rent" scandal broke, Armstrong Williams continues to look ridiculous. This column about Iraq proves that Williams is not just a political whore -- he's a dumb political whore. Williams writes:

There has been lots of talk about how the legacy of this administration will be tied to the success of Iraq. We use words like goals, agendas, and platform to measure the success of this mission.

How about good and evil?

This concept has been largely absent from our vocabulary ... This (Iraq election) is good triumphing over the evil of oppression.

Absent from our vocabulary? What planet has Williams been living on over the past four years?

For starters, Iraq was an original cast member of the "Axis of Evil." Last week, one of the best-read magazines in the Western world, The Economist, framed the Bush democracy doctrine partly in these terms: "... the world really is divided between good and evil."

The media has enthusiastically embraced the vocabulary of "good and evil." On Jan. 28, conservative commentator David Brooks told millions of viewers watching the "Jim Lehrer News Hour" that "you have got tens of thousands of candidates and hundreds of thousands of millions of voters who are braving all to actually go vote. This is as clear a contrast between good and evil as one sees in human nature."

The publishing world is also quite fluent in the language of good and evil. For example, there's Peter Singer's book, The President of Good and Evil, as well as the two conservatives who co-authored Saddam: The Face of Evil.

And magazines? More than two years ago, The Nation's Katha Pollitt wrote this column headlined "Beyond Good and Evil." And what about Eduardo Galeano's article in The Progressive ("Theater of Good and Evil") published only months after 9/11? In the wake of 9/11, Cabinet magazine interviewed philosopher Alain Badiou -- the title? "On Evil." Last year, National Review's Jonah Goldberg even used a "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" analogy to let us know he welcomed the view that "the battle against evil is for right now."

In fact, even the bad guys are using the good-and-evil lexicon. Just before the Iraqi election, terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi blasted democracy as an "evil principle."

Williams may not like what all of these people have to say about good and evil, but he's nuts when he suggests that those two words aren't center-stage in the debate over U.S. foreign policy.