Chris Matthews from CNBC's Hardball, talking about Middle Eastern terrorism . . .

"If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil -- they just have a different perspective."

Um, no. My friend Jon who thinks professional wrestling is fun and entertaining television has a different prespective. That has not prompted me to slap a big old jihad on him and blow his house up.

Once your different perspective prompts you to start deliberately targetting civilians to murder as many as you can to make a statement . . . well, then, anyone who is not a moral imbecile should have no problem recognizing evil when it presents itself. Otherwise, what is evil? Hitler had a different perspective, right? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, just all differences of opinion and world view, never mind to mountain of corpses stacked to lunar orbit. You've got to let people be people, even when the people in question are psychopaths of the highest order, I suppose.

Stupidity of Matthew's sort is a luxury I am both glad and saddened to know we can afford in western liberal democracies. Glad, because that means we have the luxury of exploring all manner of ideas without restraint, a very good thing indeed. Sad because that particular idea indicates just how very little people like Matthews care at all about the victims of those different -- but certainly not 'evil' -- perspectives, how much their struggle for basic human rights and basic human dignity and the simple right to live means absolutely nothing to comfortable, spoiled westerners like Chris Matthews.

Which leaves me still wondering when the western liberal and progressive political tradition was transformed from confronting evil to making excuses for it.

/rant mode.