A reader writes:
Your comment about Bush trying to frame the Iraq war as a simple battle between "Good" and "Evil" reminds me of my one 9/11 joke. I know it's wrong, insensitive, and politically incorrect to have a 9/11 joke, but since I don’t have a TV show to lose (and it speaks to your point), here it is.
On 9/11 my youngest son was 5 years old. The attack was mentioned in his school, and he saw some of the story on TV when my wife and I were watching. Being curious, he asked why people would do such a thing. We always try to be as honest as we can with our children, while keeping in mind their intellectual and developmental limits. So we told him that there were some bad people who don't like America and they did this bad thing because they wanted to hurt us. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity at the time, but I felt very conflicted with what I had said. I didn't like that I'd resorted to overly general categories like bad people or that I felt I had to completely skip over some of the rationale for anti-American sentiment, even though I believe some of it is justified. I just wondered if I had done him a disservice by glossing over it so superficially. But then a couple days later, Bush finally addressed the nation on the attack. And his speech was filled with overgeneralizations about the "evil doers", their acts of evil and how we would track them down and good would prevail over evil. Suddenly I felt better about what I had said to my 5 year old because I realized that Bush's parents had obviously explained it to him the same way.