[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Given that the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times are to journalism what a fire hydrant is to a dog who just swallowed 20 ounces of Diet Pepsi, I turn to these paper giants for entertainment, never wisdom.
As sunless repositories exclusively committed to liberal reporting and liberal commentary, subtleties in the daily news developments streak by them as if Helen Keller were their sentinel.
Actions more nuanced than a two-handed biff on the nose by an escaped polar bear with distemper elude the boys at both Timeses. Instead, they are pining away for gay marriage, a gay military, or at least healthcare reform for recently aborted babies.
Downtown at 2nd and Spring, when the editorial writing boys interrupted their Texas Two-Step dance lessons to muse on a complicated topic, their thinking resembled overcooked spaghetti falling out of a 20th story window. Liberal boys are more eminently qualified to judge whether the red light signal should be at the top of the stack or the bottom. Or should Florida be classified as part of the Deep South or as Northern Cuba.
You Must be Slightly Smarter
They are intellectually under-equipped even to daydream about whether Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee should be spanked or applauded for legally sanctioning the introduction of what you and I call waterboarding. More effeminate gentlemen, spanning the entirety of the left-wing community, indelicately label such treatment of terrorists as torture.
In the Justice Dept., enemies of President Bush and all persons who are not sworn liberals brought suit against Messrs. Yoo and Byee for allegedly disrespecting the U.S. Constitution by sanctioning waterboarding and other rather coarse methods previously employed but not publicly known.
The soft-handed gentlemen who developed the suit and sought to ruin the careers and personal lives of the aforementioned, were motivated entirely by politics. They were infuriated because the Yoo-Bybee verdict — in the frightening days not long after 9/11 — not only blessed what they called torture, worse, it legitimized what the boys at the Timses always like to put in quotation marks, Mr. Bush’s “war on terror.”
Along with The Joke Who Became President and assorted Whores for Obama the breadth of the land, they think it is the sheerest coincidence that 100 percent of terrorists threatening America are Muslims. They say the war on terror is a conjured conservative concoction designed to allow Mr. Bush to stomp the Constitution whenever the mood struck him.
In the last 7 ½ years, liberal journalists have leaked lies and partial truths to build up anti-Bush public sentiment to buttress their claims that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee should be professionally tortured.
The Correct Conclusion
But the liberal boys were thunderstruck the other day when a career Justice Dept. exonerated Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee, not because they necessarily did the right thing. Rather, he concluded, they operated in scary times, and they operated within the purity realm of good faith.
Drat, said the Los Angeles Times, headlining its editorial this morning “Cleared but not vindicated.” The appellation only would apply, I say, if they were talking about O.J., but since he was a black liberal, the Times excused him. Their reasoning was as convoluted as their thinking when they stray past “What is one plus one?”
Over at forbes.com, Richard A. Epstein agreed with the verdict while maintaining that the White House lawyers were wrong in their advice to the President. Mr. Epstein wrote: “Their misshapen constitutional analysis held that the President's exercise of his “commander in chief powers” could not be overridden by congressional legislation or international treaties, including the Geneva conventions.”
For the future, Mr. Epstein said that, as this case proves, it is folly for another person to judge whether an act was executed in “good faith,” the basis for the present Justice Dept. ruling.
Mr. Epstein concludes, brilliantly, I believe:
“On reflection, however, the courageous (Justice Dept. arbiter who made the ruling) reached the right result for the wrong reason. It is a mistake to make the protection afforded government officials facing political charges depend on that key finding of good faith, on which people acting in good faith could easily differ. To get the needed information on mental state requires extensive investigations that necessarily put many other public officials in the crosshairs, which could in turn make able people more reluctant to take up the thankless task of public service.
“Given these institutional risks, good faith is not the right test. What is needed is absolute immunity from investigation.”
