Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/06/john-yoo-government-lawyer-wh.html
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Let’s remember who’s saying this:
"Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty…
Cassel: Also no law by Congress – that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."
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So we can torture them but we can’t send them home? I never really understood Mr. Yoo.
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That would leave you with no one to torture…
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Somehow, they never have the epiphany while in office, only after. I didn’t think it was possible to dislike Yoo even less, but this willful idiocy of “but I assumed only “good” people would ever be elected president” somehow makes it happen.
Any system that requires having the right people in charge is doomed to failure. Our system was specifically designed to avoid that, but in the name of common sense convenience of the moment we allowed the safeguards to gradually erode, until we end up with a presidential office that is basically electing a dictator every 4 years. We’re getting what we deserve because we let it be that way.
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I’d praise him for being consistent, but after hearing him speak and reading some of his op-eds, it’s clear John Yoo believes executive power is good when wielded by Republican presidents, and bad when wielded by Democratic presidents. (He did give Obama a pass on drone strikes, but not gun control.)
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Let’s also remember who’s saying this:
This is the guy who refused to answer as to whether “burying someone alive” is going too far as an interrogation technique.
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Look, when you find yourself in agreement with a monster like John Yoo – if you do not yourself happen to be a monster – it’s just got to be a complete, serendipitous coincidence. For whatever reason, Yoo’s dander is up regarding Trump-- but we have to believe his reasons have nothing to do with rationality, ethics, morality (you know, like humanity-level stuff). It should be treated in the same way as if you had found out he had similar taste in ties or dog breeds.
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Wow. This just speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
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The guy’s crazy, running amok, he’s doing all these silly arrogant things and not even taking the time to torture people because he can.
It’s like a rat shitting in the mouth of a boa constrictor. I like watching it because I think, man wouldn’t it be great it that Boa just crushed him right now!!
Or conversely, when you find that even John Yoo thinks you’ve gone a wee bit too far, you may want to consider just how big of a doucherag you really are.
But, the ego on our great cheeto overlord will never allow that degree of self reflection (or any really) to happen.
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Probably John is just the messenger and we shouldn’t shoot him just because some Laws are constructed in such a way as to allow for interpretations which underwrite whatever behaviour a powerful entity, which is still bound by the appearance of lawfulness, decides to engage in.
Probably we should ‘shoot’ John because he has made a career out of enabling unjust behaviour by those powerful entities using his knowledge and skill at manipulating the interpretation of law to encode that behaviour as lawful.
Whatever individual cases of enabling he’s done are beside the point and always give him the out of throwing up his hands and hiding behind his ‘interpretation’ defence. His real bad behaviour, the stuff you really could nail him on, is choosing to perform this service. Not the actual minutiae of said service.
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