Yoo lords his rectum over DOJ, rectum demands hug.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

In the WSJ, John Yoo, Dick Cheney’s legal architect for torture and war crimes, attempts to galvanize the collusion of Obama’s and Holder’s DOJ in war crimes, principally by daring them to do jack squat about his blatant guilt.  This Week in Tyranny shows us the game plan inherent in the war criminals’ efforts:

Dick Cheney is shameless and is eager to be publicly guilty. He has made his life an open, defiant challenge to the US government. Does anyone have the courage to take him down, and unleash the inevitable whirlwind? Or does the entire DC establishment prefer to live in quiet, peaceful acquiescence? Those are the only options at this point. Cheney wants to cast as wide a net of complicity as possible; he wants not just his White House implicated but future ones. Not just the White House, but the executive branch. Not just the executive branch but the legislative and judicial branches as well. He wants as much company as possible so he does not go down as a singular villain. It is working, and will continue as long as our leaders prefer to put their immediate comfort over their obligations.

First, in a fit of hubris, spit, and vinegar usually arrogated by kings alone, Yoo rubs Obama’s nose in Yoo’s “victory” over justice, i.e., the DoJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation, claiming himself as a “gift” that “saved” Obama’s presidency, even though the president, Holder, and DoJ “didn’t make it easy.”   Yoo goes on to denounce American law enforcement and ideals in the same breath.  

I hope Obama enjoys being forcefully bowed to the smell of castigation in someone else’s shit (I can’t take it myself).  Yoo further dishes out some punishment to Obama for ordering Gitmo closed, ending torture, and trying Kalid Sheik Muhammed and Abdulmutallab as criminals in courts of law.

Yoo then goes on to specifically insult Holder and the OPR for investigating Yoo’s war crimes.

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR’s investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR’s preferred outcome. They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president’s commander-in-chief power. They accused us [Yoo & Bybee] of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently-and with no legal obligation to do so-sat through days of questioning.

OPR omitted precedents that undermined their preferred outcomes?  Such standard wingnut projection is especially rich coming from Yoo, as that was specifically a charge leveled at Yoo and Bybee by the investigation, but he clearly cannot stop himself:

OPR’s investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department’s own standards that last week the department’s ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

Margolis did come in after the investigation was completed by OPR and change the recommendations, because he’s a “cleaner,” and now himself an accomplice to war crimes, imho.  Some pertinent, unattributed hearsay about the guy:

“Taking [Margolis] on is a losing battle,” says the source. “The guy is Yoda. Nobody fucks with the guy.”

….

Margolis cut his teeth as an organized-crime prosecutor, and he often uses mob analogies in talking about his career at the Justice Department. When asked by an incoming attorney general what his job duties entailed, Margolis responded: “I’m the department’s cleaner. I clean up messes.”

The analogy calls to mind the character of Winston Wolfe, played by Harvey Keitel in the 1994 film “Pulp Fiction.” In the movie, Wolfe is called in by mob honchos to dispose of the evidence after two foot soldiers accidentally kill a murder witness in the back of their car.

However, even Margolis was smart enough to call the OPR’s original judgment that Yoo and Bybee either knew or should have known better “a close question,” something, I suppose, about which “reasonable people could disagree,” as is said all too often about our blatantly criminal elite.  

Jack Balkin apparently disagrees with Margolis’ dismissal of Yoo and Bybee’s culpability based on the proposition that “most lawyers are scum:”

Margolis concludes that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. But lawyers often make arguments that are bad or even laughably bad, and this by itself does not violate the very low standard set by rules of professional responsibility. These rules are set up by jurisdictions to weed out the worst offenders, leaving the rest of the legal profession to make entirely stupid, disingenuous and asinine arguments that normal people with functioning moral consciences would not make. That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair’s breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own.

Perhaps Balkin understands that widening the net of complicity in war crimes to include the entire legal profession is not in everyone’s best interests.  The way Cheney and Yoo publicly and brazenly berate Obama, Holder, DoJ, law enforcement, and so-called “American ideals,” I’m not confident that Obama and Holder will be seeking to avoid complicity.  Instead, I expect they will give John Yoo’s lordly rectum the hug it demands.