Here’s Charles Pierce again:
This should have been John Yoo’s week for being roasted on the public spit. His memos came out. There’s an interview in Esquire where he attempts (badly) to get out from under his role as the waterboarding consigliere. He stands — behind a podium at a respected law school — revealed as the almost perfect apparatchik, a guy who would have found a way to make the trains to the internment camps run on time. The Frontline series on Bush’s war demonstrates pretty clearly that moral courage was in short supply in and around the Avignon Presidency. (Secretary Powell? Isn’t this your soul in the sink? Hello? Bueller?) But the people who really are astonishing are people like Yoo, who sprang with such alacrity to the task of dismantling America. A guy picks up the phone at the DOJ over a weekend and he’s blue-penciling the Bill of Rights, and the respective role of the Congress and the president, and the integrity of international treaties, and virtually everything that differentiates the United States from East freaking Germany? Too bad the janitor didn’t pick up the phone. Is there any doubt that, if C-Plus Augustus had wanted a legal opinion that allowed him to pick off pedestrians at random from the Truman Balcony, Yoo would have written a memo to that very effect? He should be pumping gas in the Imperial Valley for a living. He should be kept away from the law for the same reason we keep Charlie Manson out of the cutlery drawer. He should have been the story but, of course, Barack Obama went bowling.
Can’t Be True?
September 5, 2008 in Commentaries, MEDIA, Politics by Mardé | 2 comments
Charles Pierce I hope does not nail it again with this little paragraph out of Altercation, but it may be true, it may be so. Somebody say it isn’t so!
I have no hope for the next 56 days. None whatsoever. Reality’s relevance was lost somewhere between Invesco Field and the Xcel Center. We’re going to get lofty post-partisan dreariness from both presidential candidates, and a vicious 1992 culture-war brawl under the radar, which will be thoroughly deplored in public by the people who profit from it most. I shouldn’t have to watch Karl Rove tell me about the American people and how they vote. I should get to watch Karl Rove being hauled off in chains to Danbury. The major television networks will curl up into a ball roughly five minutes from the start of the first presidential debate. The whole campaign is now going to be conducted on the level of pure mythology. If they had any intellectual honesty whatsoever, the people on TV would dress in white robes and divine the campaign through the movement of waves and the burning of laurel leaves. For a minute back in the spring, it seemed like the country was ready to admit to itself that it poisoned itself with bull***t over the past seven years and was prepared to issue itself a corrective. Not any more. We’re back to “personality” and “character” and “narratives” and all the other stuff that keeps anyone from thinking about what’s really at stake here.
Karl Rove in chains to Danbury — now that’s a good idea.
Tags: altercation, charles pierce, culture war, first presidential debate, invesco, karl rove, major television networks, mythology, Xcel Center