[1] OK, here's something it's not at all difficult to understand. A person P can recognize that E is a great evil, and yet be opposed to course of action C to remove E, because she thinks that C will fail, or have consequences even worse than E, or be too costly, or what have you. It is perfectly possible for her, then, to explain why she opposes C even though she recognizes the moral enormity of E. She might even, if she is not of a cramped mind set, be able to acknowledge that R, who disagrees with her by favouring C, has some bona fide reasons for doing so, while continuing to believe that she, P, is right in her overall assessment of the situation and that he, R, is wrong.
Thus, to take a topical example from recent times, P may have been perfectly clear that Saddam Hussein and his regime constituted great evils, but have opposed the Iraq war nonetheless for one or more of the kind of reasons I've just indicated - but without belittling the reasons or the motives, or impugning the character, of R who supported the war, impressed by the magnitude of the evils that were Saddam and the Baathist regime, and who made a more optimistic assessment than P did about the likely course and consequences of the war.
[2] Now, here's something else it's not at all difficult to understand. If P opposes C, not by giving due weight to the magnitude of the evil that is E, but by referring to it in belittling and sneering ways, as though anyone like R who takes E seriously, and disagrees with P about the advisability of course of action C, must be either of low intelligence or of dubious moral character or both, then she, P, might be thought by others not to have a morally serious attitude to the scope of the evil that is E, using evasion and mockery where a person of mature judgement would refrain from doing this in a matter of such gravity.
Imagine, for example, that one fine morning you were to open the Guardian to discover the following about the use of torture by the CIA or some other US agency:
Torture is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of Western security policy can be reduced to bedtime stories.
Or to discover this:
The Duluth Herald is not alone in condensing issues about interrogation techniques into simplistic morality tales.
Or suppose your Guardian writer were to write dismissively of 'the trendier option involv[ing] incorporating the security apparatus of the US into modernity by teaching it to live in a law-saturated present'; or to write mockingly of 'the notion that metropolitan London or New York could "infuse" American security agencies with a rights-respecting consciouness'.
In fact, it's rather difficult to think of such stuff, with reference to the use of torture by US security agencies, turning up in the Guardian, but if it did, it would at once be condemned by liberal-minded readers as at best lightminded and at worst a species of apologia. But that is exactly the sort of thing that Priyamvada Gopal was saying last week about horrendous episodes of violence against Afghan women. The locutions I have used in illustration of my torture example are adapted precisely from her.
[3] It takes a special kind of vacancy to want to pass off the sort of thing I've discussed under [2] as if it were merely the sort of thing I've discussed under [1]. That is the vacancy of the Flying Rodent in this post. It is the vacancy of an obsession not to want to recognize when those you perceive as being on your political 'side' haven't got a leg to stand on - to want to defend them at all costs by facile point-scoring.