Hannah Arendt was wrong. Evil is never banal. Evil is fascinating, provocative and mind-focusing. Adolph Eichmann was probably a bore at a Nazi dinner party, a dull bureaucrat following orders, but his acts forever fascinate the human mind. We try but fail to understand how a fellow human could do what he did without conscience, without regret, without remorse.

What is banal is the moral preening of those who judge the way others stand up to evil, who judge those who compromise in their human fallibility to fight evil so that the rest of us can enjoy the good (and the good life). What's banal are the pundits and partisan ideologues who get their hands dirty only changing an ink cartridge but who seek revenge on others who, acting in good faith, did what they believed was right in thwarting evil. What's banal are those who round up the usual suspects from history, usually the cliched villains of Nazi Germany, and trot them out for comparison in show trials of their fantasies.

Shame requires that these moral purists make distinctions, sort of. "I know it's offensive to compare almost anything to the Nazis," writes Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, who proceeds to offend: "But the Bush-era memos struck me as echoes from the past." Mark McKeon, who prosecuted war criminals in Bosnia, concedes that the level of Republican crimes does not approach the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, but he would nevertheless punish "the most senior government officials responsible for (contemporary torture) crimes."

The debate is not one of good vs. evil, but of moral abstraction vs. grim reality. The debate has moved from saying that "torture is wrong" -- almost everybody agrees with that, in the abstract -- to seeking revenge against those falsely perceived as moral enemies in our midst. It's easy to scorn lawyers who abuse the right to sue, but making lawyers criminals for the advice they offer is alien to everything we are as Americans. Continued...