On John Yoo, Brian Tierney doesn’t get it

The New York Times weighs in on John Yoo’s columnizing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. As I had suspected from Harold Jackson’s “contractual obligations” defense of Yoo, the impetus for Yoo’s hiring came not from the editorial board but from publisher Brian Tierney.

Big surprise.

The Times:

To critics of the hiring, (Tierney) said, “The most important speech to defend is the speech you hate,” and he said there were not all that many critics. “I’ve gotten more mail recently on our making our comics smaller than I have on John Yoo.”

Let’s parse that.

I think most liberals would agree that it’s important to defend the right to speech, even — and especially — when there’s an effort to suppress that speech because the speaker and/or her ideas are odious. Defending the right to that speech is different from defending the speech itself; it’s why the ACLU can defend the Klan’s right to march in Indiana without defending the Klan’s ideas. Everybody understands the distinction.

What critics of the Yoo column — myself included — are suggesting is that Yoo doesn’t deserve the platform he’s been given. It’s that simple.

Final thought: Harold Jackson seems like a decent fellow, but I’m skeptical of his suggestion in the Times and elsewhere that it’s only recently become clear — thanks to the recent release of additional torture memos — what a hot potato John Yoo is. Jackson:

Asked if the release of the memos affected his view of hiring Mr. Yoo, Mr. Jackson said: “From a personal perspective, yes. We certainly know more now than we did then, but we didn’t go into that contract blindly. I’m not going to say the same decision wouldn’t have been made.”

But Yoo’s status has been publicly clear for quite some time. He made his infamous comment about the president’s authority to crush a child’s testicles in December 2005. He’s been the bete noire of anti-torture forces ever since. Anybody who’d done a cursory background check on Yoo would’ve known this history. The recent release of memos only elaborates on what we already knew.