Most of the people here are sophisticated enough to already understand this. If you are, my apologies.

Breaker used the term "evil-doer" in a post below.

As far as I know, this term has never been used in American political discourse until Bush Jr. came along.

It's an odd term. It suggests that the person who's being called an "evil-doer" is, in fact, evil.

This suggests that the person using this term is the opposite of an "evil-doer". Such a person would have to be a "good-doer", or perhaps a better term would be a "do-gooder", which means someone who is a naive idealist.

If you call someone an "evil-doer", does this mean that such a person is, in fact, evil, or is this just your perspective? Do evil people consider themselves evil, or do they consider themselves good? "Good" and "evil" are absolutist terms. We can abstractly call something good or evil. Murder. Rape. Theft. All evil things. But suppose you murder in self-defense. Is that still evil, and are you evil for doing so?

In the American English lexicon there are a large verity of words one can use to attribute a negative or postive quality upon someone or something. A person could be psychotic, a lunatic, or demented. He could be hateful, deceitful, vengeful, or vindictive. He could be unforgiving, spiteful, malicious, or vicious.

So why say someone is an "evil-doer"?

Well, 1) the term is Orwellian. It boils the idea down to the point where just hearing the term makes you dumber. It's just a hair more complex than someone being "double plus un-good".

and 2) good and evil has very strong religious connotations. The embodyment of evil is Lucifer. Therefore an "evil-doer" is one of Satan's agents. Not so surprisingly, bin Laden himself referred to the United States as "The Great Satan". I guess bin Laden and Bush could never agree on who was in Beelzebub's back pocket.

And Lastly, there is no need to examine the motivations of someone who is evil. Why does this person do evil things? Because he's evil. Not that this person has grievances so horrible that they feel that violence is the only appropriate response.

In other words, the advantage of using the term "evil-doer" is that it makes it easy to hide your sins. Sins that would have gotten in the way if you wished to compound them.