He stood there tall and dashing, peering down at her with a set of mesmerizing sapphire eyes. It wasn__ the eyes that had her sex-drive squealing into overdrive; it was that_hair. Now, Tarrah had never really been into redheads before, but damn, she sure as hell would be willing to convert.

So what__ your name?_ the stranger asked.Tarrah pulled his shirt away from her head and held out her hand. __arrah. Tarrah Reid.__e slipped his hand into hers, his cheeks stiffening as he held back a smile.Tarrah sighed, knowing exactly what he was thinking. She was completely aware of the fact that she held the name of a famous Hollywood actress. The association actually helped with her __hristmas floozy_ persona during the holidays, so she__ never really minded.

Meg,_ he whispered. __t wouldn__ be real love if there weren__ the possibility for another response to him. If we couldn__ choose not to love him, then our love would be empty. That__ why there__ evil in this world, because there__ free choice in this world. He allows the one to prove the other.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism__he willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it__s the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.