In case you missed it, Jon Stewart confronted war criminal John Yoo last night. The conservative defense of an executive branch with no limits to its powers at home or abroad is, well, as gob-smacking as it always has been. It is not, of course, a conservative argument at all. In its implications – in a war defined as unending and an executive defined as all-powerful – are proto-fascist: Jacksonianism with a waterboard.
I came away from the exchange, wondering if Yoo just isn't that smart, as well as shockingly ignorant of history, and morality. Maybe he was off his game. Or maybe Berkeley has lowered its standards. By the way, when on earth are we going to be able to read that OPR report on the shoddiness of Yoo's scholarship?
The full interview is here and here. Drum thinks that Yoo got the better of the interview:
The real problem with interviewing Yoo is this: once you start arguing about the legal basis of the president's wartime powers you've pretty much lost the game. That's a subject that's genuinely complex, and a guy like Stewart will never win an argument about that with a guy like Yoo. He'll just toss out yet another precedent and plow on. The debate really needed to be about the fundamentals: Stewart needed to graphically describe all the things that were done — multiple waterboardings, sleep deprivation, head slamming, stress positions, etc. — and get Yoo to defend those as permissible.
The Dish 