Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams of Ireland said "Right now, I could kill George Bush. No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that." Her crowd of leftists in Dallas gave her a standing ovation. Now she says she misspoke.

I would agree that leftists such as Ms. Williams are 'nice people' in that they mean well--she's a Peace laureate after all. A recent interview with British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was a communist for most of his life:

"There's been a systematic attempt to remove communism or indeed revolutionary socialism from the political agenda and turn it into something like a political pathology or a sin. I have refused to go along with this. This was a good cause, and continues to be a good cause, even though the things they have stood for haven't worked. As a political programme communism is no longer on the agenda, and it's no longer possible to say I'm a communist. But it doesn't mean I don't think it was a perfectly legitimate and indeed admirable thing for people to be."

Evil isn't Snidely Whiplash or the Legion of Doom who explicitly state an intention to hurt people (and are comic characters). It's people with really good intentions operating under extreme confidence against other people's will, creating a greater good such as the no-Bush world, or rule 'by the people'.

It's good to know what evil really is: good intentions, enthusiastically applied, on a bad theory. These people are creating utopias or protecting some principle, and the mere sadists are just opportunists. The idea that killing a politician who won two democratic elections, because one disagrees (strongly!) with them is based on the premise that Bush actually stole the election, or that he is in fact cynically trying to favor big business knowing this merely sucks the life out of average people, or some other caricature. Hobsbawm thinks we should give him credit for his intentions, which as applied rationalized both terror and an unimaginable bureaucracy. As Nietzsche said, no one lies like the indignant, and they lie to promote a greater good. It is facts that matter, because facts constrain theories, and if you assume the wrong facts, your theory that explains those facts is wrong, and an extreme application of that theory is evil.