The Inky publishes John Yoo, proves again that he’s incompetent

I think I’ve got a long and honorable history of expressing disdain for John Yoo — the lawyer President Bush got to write memos saying that the laws of war (including torture) don’t actually apply during wartime — so I’ll outsource most of my disdain for his appearance on the Inky’s editorial page today to the good people at Young Philly Politics:

I don’t normally like to curse on the front page of the blog. The kids and all that. But… John Fucking Yoo? Seriously? John Fucking Yoo?

That sums up one case against Yoo’s op-ed piece, which takes Attorney General Eric Holder to task for his “nation of cowards” comments on race last week: I tend to be a “reasonable people can disagree” kind of guy, but where John Yoo is concerned, I am in favor of a good societal shunning. Nonetheless, there he is, writing for the Inquirer.

And writing with breathtaking stupidity.

Our new president likes to invoke comparisons to the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. To Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal was a “great truth, applicable to all men at all times.” In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln justified the carnage of the battle with the prospect of preserving the “new nation,” created by “our fathers,” that was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Our nation fulfilled that promise when it amended the Constitution to make clear that the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law because of skin color. Immigrants came to our shores because of the promise that they would have equality of opportunity, free from governments that choose winners and losers because of their parents or their race.

Holy crap. I mean: Holy crap.

You know which Constitutional amendment made clear the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law for any reason? That would be the 14th Amendment. Which was passed in 1868. Two years later, the 15th Amendment rather more explicitly guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. In 1870.

Apparently our nation fulfilled its promise that all men are created equal about 80 years or so before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, 90 years or so before Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, and 95 years or so before LBJ spearheaded passage of the Voting Rights Act. It’s as though — in John Yoo’s world — Jim Crow never existed.

What utter crap. It’s stunning that a former high-ranking executive branch official — a man who teaches law — could be so openly ignorant of American history as to make such an assertion. Eric Holder deserves some of the criticism he’s getting for the comments he made last week. But John Yoo is too blazingly stupid to deserve the op-ed page of a major American newspaper to offer that criticism. I’m embarrassed for the Inquirer.