Originally published at: MAGA Looks to Notorious War On Terror Lawyer For Trump II Inspiration
As Trump allies seek to justify deploying the military at home — be it to round up undocumented immigrants, quell protests, or simply make an aggressive point — they’re looking again and again to the early 2000s. The nation is in crisis. An invisible enemy has attacked, requiring a powerful presidency to confront a novel…
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Funny how these first-gen immigrants gravitate towards the Right. It’s like they’re so dumb they fall for all the flag waving. Of course, they’re almost uniformly religious too.
I crossed the street this morning because an African American Jehovah’s Witness was in my path. How can I not tell them that without this precious book their people might have avoided hundreds of years of beatings and rapes?
What they’re selling in these churches is the right to tell everyone else in the world that God hates them. Then, licensing as Holy anything that turns a dime, from slavery to climate change.
Balls to all religions.
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MAGA Looks to Notorious War On Terror Lawyer For Trump II Inspiration
If this doesn’t scare the shit out of any American citizen, then he/she must be brain dead.
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To call Yoo a degenerate guttersnipe would be idle flattery.
In an interview, the questioner asked Yoo if, in order to extract information, it would be legal and proper to crush a detainee’s tentacles, he assured us that it would be. And I’m pretty sure he extended the right to torture even to the families of suspects.
This just demonstrates that the Trump horror show did not arise out of a vacuum. It was carefully nurtured by the Bush administration.
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John Yoo is a man who lacks any moral compass or common humanity. He has been a loud propoent of torture since the Gulf War. I was shocked when he got his gig at Berkley but there he is teaching law students how to be morally repugnant. He is the kind of man JD Vance and his tech bro buds would look up to. He is the kind of man Trump would understand and Kevin Roberts would adore.
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At times when I’ve had back pain that would have me sell my own mother, I think that this is just a sample of what it’s like to be tortured. How anyone can do this to another human being is always beyond me. Ditto for the minds of those approving it.
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I’ve noticed that, too, and it goes way back to people like Henry Kissinger and Leo Strauss. No doubt it’s an act of overcompensation, to “prove” that they are 100% Americans.
As for religion, it was particle physicist Victor Stenger who said that science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into the World Trade Center.
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Like everything else on the Right, it has a perverse sexual element to it.
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" One Heritage Foundation official warned TPM about the “terrorist element” coming out in force if Trump wins the 2024 election."
No mention, of course, of the terrorist element Trump will unleash if he loses; conspicuous, as he is the only president in our history to have done so.
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“I don’t think prosecution as properly used in our system is for going after your enemies or investigating your opponents,” Yoo said in the December 2023 conversation.
“Torturing them is the way to go, it’s cheaper and faster, and a lot more fun” he added after the recording stopped.
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Finally someone who understands what I live with.
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Yoo said. “And not simply to respond to protests. It has to be civil unrest that prevents law and order, that prevents law enforcement"
In the opinion of… ???
…the guy who wants to do it. The guy who’s immune from the consequences.
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I saw that quote when it was made, and again today, and I still don’t know who the “terrorist element” is. At first I thought it was a reference to domestic MAGA terrorists, on his side. It’s ludicrous to ponder, but could he mean otherwise?
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In 2014, Erwin Chemerinsky, them the Dean of the UC-Irvine Law School, said Yoo should be prosecuted:
Yoo’s memo “directly led to the torture policy that resulted,” Chemerinsky said in an interview, citing Mayer’s evidence. “That’s being part of a conspiracy to violate a federal statute. Someone isn’t excused from criminal liability just because they work for the federal government.”
The Federal Torture Act defines torture broadly, as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering…upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The penalty for violating the Torture Act is imprisonment “for not more than 20 years.”
In 2017, Chemerinsky became Dean of UC-Berkeley School of Law, where Yoo is a member of the faculty. I wonder how that is going?
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“The nation is in crisis.” Yes it is. “An invisible enemy has attacked.” Alas, all too visible is the decrepit demagogue with the bizarre combover, and his Hitler jugend minions. “Requiring a powerful presidency to confront a novel threat.” True indeed. Harris will need to act powerfully and decisively to fight off the fascist insurrection.
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This gets too little attention. The so-called “unitary executive” under W was a first crack at authoritarianism. More polite, superficially. But you remember Yoo, and his enthusiasm for crushing the testicles of our enemies’s children, and you realize it was just as bad.
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MAGA Looks to Notorious War On Terror Lawyer For Trump II Inspiration
TPM perpetuated in its headline an intellectual error that underlies America’s obsession with terrorism, and its inability to deal with it.
When it started out, it was called the War on Terrorism, not Terror. But even this was illogical: how do you wage war against a tactic? It’s as if we called World War II the War on Blitzkrieg.
Then it evolved into the War on Terror, which is even more irrational. Waging war against an emotion?
That, of course, barely scratches the surface of the illogicality and special pleading involved in the word “terrorism.” Twenty years ago “terrorism” was the world most Americans associated with “Islam.” Yet one searches the current discourse in vain for MAGA’s violence and threats of violence to be called “terrorism.”
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Recycling an apologist for waterboarding is grotesque!
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" In the absence of a national emergency"???
I would say that we are in a national emergency of gigantic proportions. Either we defeat Trump and his like minded Dictatorial Assholes, or we become North Korea.
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