Jay Bybee

[Posted at Confabulation and the Huffington Post, in response to the publicity surrounding the release of the "torture memos," and a Frank Rich column in the New York Times titled "The Banality of Bush White House Evil."]

If you Google for images of Judge Jay Bybee, you get pictures of a handsome, thoroughly affable-looking guy who indeed projects as exactly what he is, a suburban dad involved with Cub Scouts and Little League and his church (he's Mormon). There's one photo of him and his wife and four kids sitting on the Capital steps that couldn't be more wholesome if he had commissioned Norman Rockwell. Only Bybee is also our equivalent of a Nazi bureaucrat. Seen in that light, the pictures become terrifying.

Frank Rich is quite right to invoke Hannah Arendt's famous"banality of evil" thesis. Like all theories that have their heyday, then recede, then roar back, there has been a reaction against Arendt's theory because (duh) it is not applicable in all instances. But what we are uncovering here demonstrates just how rich her insights are.