Our latest installment in the Dictionary of National D-bags is John Yoo, perhaps the greatest d-bag of the early 21st century.
Yoo is an Ivy educated d-bag, graduating with a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale. But because he is “off-white” he is acceptable to white d-bags as a poster boy for Horatio Alger-style luck and pluck. Like his mentor Clarence Thomas, Yoo had all the benefits of American society but none of the guilt. This happy situation has allowed him to be the purest voice of d-bag advocacy in the United States today.
You may know Yoo for his controversial opinions on the power of the U. S. government, including his opinion that the president has the right, if not the obligation, to spy on American citizens during a time of war. (This is extremely relevant today in light of the Senate’s passage of a bill to immunize telecoms who broke the law and protect the Bush administration from people finding out exactly how far they peered into our lives. Bush “relishes” signing it.) Or maybe you know Yoo for his “torture memos” that argued the state has the power to inflict whatever pain short of death it thinks necessary on captives. These things certainly make Yoo a tyrant and a monster — but not a d-bag! Monsters are capable of integrity; d-bags think integrity is for pussies.
D-bags say they deserve to be exempt from rules that everyone else has to follow — like keeping your contracts, honoring your promises, and believing in fair play. That is why when Yoo’s man is president he says things like, “To his critics, Mr. Bush is a ‘King George’ bent on an ‘imperial presidency.’ But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive.”
But when Yoo’s man is not president he argues the exact opposite in a tone of principled integrity: “President Clinton exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost in the area in which those powers are already at their height — in our dealings with foreign nations. Unfortunately, the record of the administration has not been a happy one, in light of its costs to the Constitution and the American legal system. On a series of different international relations matters, such as war, international institutions, and treaties, President Clinton has accelerated the disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law.”
You might say he’s just being a lawyer, but even lawyers can once in a while show integrity. Rather, he is the intellectual prince of d-bags, telling bald-faced lies and willfully perverting truth to justify bad people in their bad behavior. And for that John Yoo is today’s honored entry in the Dictionary of National D-bags!
NOTE TO LIBERTARIAN D-BAGS: People who think it’s OK for one party to break their promises to another party are probably the same people who will take your stuff and throw you in jail if you object.
This is copied from the transcript posted here : http://fivepublicopinions.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/john-yoo-the-smiling-face-of-american-fascism/
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.
John Yoo thinks the President gets to crush your kids’ balls, but only if the President is pretty sure he’s got a good reason.
Sure he has a good reason! He’s the HD-BIC! (head d-bag in charge).