He hardly even seems grateful for having avoided the tar and feathers and the pillory, considering that he's upbraiding President Obama for not recognizing his efforts to allow a president to "keep America Safe" by exercising unlimited executive power under the aegis of a war he has the power to start for no other reason than to give him that power. Did any of our fabled founding fathers really envision such a thing except as the perfect opposite of an American President?
Yoo's image of an American president as unlimited by law, treaty or moral scruple to a degree not unfamiliar to Attila or Tamarlane or Ghengis Khan should be producing more widespread disgust than it is, but that no doubt shows the immense power of the massive, corporate sponsored, Republican organized eruption of noxious gas and poisonous accusations: a smokescreen the likes of which hasn't been seen since the close of the Permian.
No, Professor Yoo is claiming that even though the proceedings against him were initiated under the Republicans and he was let go by Democrats, he's a victim -- Obama's victim. That ungrateful man of sorrows who apparently is all things contemptible because with the power to do evil, we would surely be overwhelmed and conquered by a few dozen guys with explosive jockey shorts. He's a victim and it's because he loves keeping America "safe."
"an entirely false narrative of his own victimization." says Joe Mathis at the Philadephia Weekly. "Get this straight, the so-called 'smear job' came under the Republican president. The so-called 'vindication' came under the Democratic president."Preposterous by the strictest definition of the word; the same problem with cause and effect that makes Obama guilty of Bush's economic train wreck.
Guilty of professional misconduct and poor judgment is a slap on the wrist considering that his support of giving the President the power to break constitutional law ad libidem as long as "there's a war on" might at one time have been punished quite severely. You'd think he'd just thank his luck and the corruption of justice that's become institutionalized in the US, but no, he has to be a victim, he has to vilify the administration that let him go free and he gets to keep his tenured job, his law license and most likely will have a great number of books bought up by CPAC and distributed for free to contributors so that he can be on the NewYork Times best-seller list and gloat about Democratic "Royalists."
There's a lot of money, there's a lot of safety in evil.
In accordance with Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution, the president takes the following oath of office:
ReplyDelete"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States; and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend, the Constitution of the United States."
The president's job, at its most elemental, is to transmit an unbroken and undiminished respect for the Constitution intact to his or her successor.
It's true that the president is C-in-C of the Armed Forces as well, so that protecting Americans from military aggression is part of the job.
However, I find it inexcusable to spin from this basic function an idea that the president's primary goal is to protect us from all harm, potentially at the expense of respect for humanity, international law, or the rights of Americans themselves. So far as I can tell, the Constitution was written by careful men to prevent exactly the sort of Daddy-State interpretation of governmental power so recently offered in validation of the Bush Administration's practices.
If government officials are going to employ such barbaric tactics as waterboarding, rendition of suspects to countries where torture is known to be practiced, and so forth, the least they could do is not seek to legitimize those savage practices as normal or constitutional. To do so is destructive to the continued viability of self-governance, and it makes a mockery of the respect for law that grounds such governance.
I have to admit that I am no constitutional law expert but having read enough of Yoo's writing I have to say, He is one scary guy.
ReplyDeleteYou realize that in his mind only ONE President had the power that he defined for a President and that was GWB.
Then when you read blogs professing to be libertarian and or conservative who you know did vote for GWB and would again if they could the gap between the beliefs they claim to have and the reality that they support is HUGE!
Dictatorship is fine, as long as WE are the dictator!
Indeed, the idea was to end the practice common to European princes to run wars and squeeze the peasants any time they needed a revenue boost.
ReplyDeleteWe've since made it far, far easier for a president to conduct wars as he will and we've come to defend that right as though it weren't a tumor in the brain of the constitution. We're so willing to have a war that we'll defend a transparent lie used as an excuse and we'll defend it to the death.
It's not new. I believe it was McCarthy who said "show me anyone who talks about the constitution and I'll show you a communist" but the steady erosion of those principles has us in a place the founder's would recognize with horror.
And yes, I think Bush had more power than any president in our history and used it in more nefarious ways. That's why they need to keep up the smokescreen by accusing that Milktoast Obama of being a dictator.