Saturday 23 March 2013

BS In the US

I've been keeping quiet about the tenth anniversary of the Iraq Wars first shots, on the advice of Charlie Piece. My thinking at the time was pretty poor, and the only thing that stopped it being dangerous was that no-one (including myself) was ever stupid enough to try and get me into a position of any real power..

That said, I wasn't so utterly detached from reality and risk assessment that there aren't any war supporters I'm not fully happy to tear to pieces.  There's wrong, and there's the kind of smug, careless wrongness that's so transparently idiotic it can only have been transcribed at all as an act of revenge.  Here's John Yoo, last seen insisting that the president has the authority to crush the testicles of any young boy he damn well pleases, explaining why it remains clear a decade on that the Iraq War has turned up all aces:
Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are unwilling to consider that remedy, aren’t you conceding that on balance, the benefits of the war outweigh the costs?
If nothing else, you'd think lawyers would want to come up with arguments that don't make them look too stupid to practise law, or for that matter, practise lace-tying.  If you buy something that turns out to cost vastly more than you were expecting it to cost, and turns out to be massively defective in addition, your only choices are to give it back in exchange for no refund, or admit you're glad you bought it?

John Yoo currently teaches law at UC Berkeley.  You could play students Ally MacBeal episodes backwards in French and they'd have a better chance of grasping consistent legal thinking.  It comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention that Yoo has the moral compass of Ming the Merciless' accountant, but the idea that his opponents are can only wish to resurrect Hussein, rather than two hundred thousand other Iraqis, is proof that these ghouls not only don't care about the hideous loss of civilian life, they're unable to even remember it

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