John Yoo’s other crimes? He’s dreadfully boring, dishonest and sloppy

John Yoo — and let his name never appear in these parts without “torture advocate” appended to them — finally made it back to the op-ed pages of the Inquirer yesterday. There’s been a lot of protest against Yoo’s column-writing gig at the Inquirer because a lot of people (reasonably, I think) don’t really want to spend their Sunday mornings curled up with a newspaper featuring the ponderings of a man credibly accused of war crimes.

But there’s another reason to hate the Inquirer’s (or rather, Brian Tierney’s) decision to give Yoo a plum gig, and it’s this: He’s dry to the point of unreadable.

Also he’s dishonest. Probably sloppy. But let’s stick with unreadable for a second.

Yoo’s prose reads like a lawyer trying to graft a legal memorandum onto a newspaper column format. Try this on for size:

Consider the recent decision in North Austin Municipal Utility Dist. v. Holder.

North Austin presented a case of “a small utility district raising a big question – the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. Under the 1965 act, Congress prohibited denying the right to vote because of race and abolished tests, taxes, and other means of disenfranchising Southern blacks. States that had used these despicable methods were forbidden from changing election law without Justice Department approval.

Justice John Roberts wrote a lot in his opinion upholding — for now — the right of Congress to pass the voting law it did. But what part does Yoo quote? The description of the case (which any smart writer would reasonably paraphrase) instead of a line or lines that gets to the heart of Roberts’ thinking about why the law should be upheld.

Yawn. What boring writing.

As for dishonest, I go to Yoo’s decision to attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with a truncated quote:

The panel included Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who has praised deciding cases with “empathy” and has said that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” judge.

Let’s look at the full sentence that Sotomayor spoke, instead of Yoo’s truncated version:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Perhaps I’m looking too much at nuance, here, but “I would hope” — which Sotomayor said, but Yoo omitted — changes the context of the quote to me. Yoo makes Sotomayor sound like she’s asserting wise Latina superiority, when the full sentence (and the fuller speech that she gave) is more humble, wrestling with how gender and race might affect one’s judicial outlook.

The nuance might be lost on Yoo — no surprise there — but it’s kind of critical. It’s the difference between Sotomayor being a racist and her pondering (perhaps clumsily) what difference her background might make to her judging. Yoo — no surprise here — weights his quotation in favor of depicting her as a racist.

And try as I might — and I’m willing to be corrected on this count — I can’t find evidence that Sotomayor has ever praised “empathy” as a desirable quality in judges. President Obama has said empathy was a quality he desired in a nominee (so presumably Sotomayor has that quality in a fashion the president desires) but I can’t find a quote from her saying the same thing.

How are the Inky’s readers served by John Yoo again?