Harold Jackson talks about why the Inky keeps printing John Yoo’s column

I have to admit: When I called Harold Jackson on Monday and asked him why the Philadelphia Inquirer keeps printing columns by torture memo author John Yoo, I expected something of a pro forma response — something along the lines of “We believe in vigorous debate from voices across the political spectrum etc. etc.” And Jackson, the Inquirer’s editorial page editor, did get around to saying stuff like that.

But this is what he said first:

“The short answer is he is under contract,” Jackson told me. “We have an obligation to fulfill the contract and we intend to.”

I hope Jackson — who was very cordial during our short talk — will forgive me for this observation: Citations of contractual obligations don’t exactly amount to a ringing endorsement of Yoo’s presence on the Inky’s editorial page.

Yoo’s columns for the Inquirer have become increasingly controversial. Blogs like Phawker, Young Philly Politics and even Will Bunch at the Inquirer’s sister publication, the Daily News, have all been raising a ruckus. Jackson told me he’s heard from angry readers, as well.

“We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of people have threatened to cancel their subscriptions,” Jackson said.

Jackson said that Yoo is under a year-long contract to provide a monthly column to the Inquirer. He did not disclose compensation or the contract’s expiration date. He said Yoo had been given the contract because A) he has Philadelphia ties, B) he’s distinguished enough professionally to hold a faculty position at Berkeley law school and C) he has insight into legal matters facing the country.

Fair enough. But, I asked Jackson, isn’t there some concern that the Inquirer is being used as a platform by a man believed by many to be a war criminal?

“I think that we’re concerned about the content of everyone, everything we publish,” Jackson said. “Certainly John Yoo is a controversial person. He himself will admit he has become a lightning rod.”

Jackson then noted the possibility Yoo could face “judicial action” for his authorship of the memos that provided the legal groundwork for the Bush Administration’s torture of terror suspects.

“We have not reached that point. The description of him as a war criminal would not be accurate. He’s a member of a distinguished university faculty with interesting things to say,” Jackson said. “If at some point it goes beyond that, we’ll have more concern about our relationship to him.”

I had one final concern: Here is the Inquirer’s description of John Yoo at the end of his column:

John Yoo (jyoo@law.berkeley.edu) is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Notice what it omits? Only the resume item that makes him most-known to the public — and, arguably, the resume item that put him on the Inky’s editorial page: His service in the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush. That, I think, is a terribly curious omission, one that obscures Yoo’s history to readers who may not have followed the torture debate closely.

“We aren’t trying to hide anything. There’s nothing to hide,” Jackson told me. “It’s just pretty standard identifier for most of the writers we have. It doesn’t go into all the curriculum vitae … Certainly, he’s got a background and a track record our readers are familiar with.”

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I believe in the First Amendment. I believe that everybody has the right to free speech, no matter how noxious the opinion or odious the speaker. I believe Nazis have the right to march down Broad Street even if it offends everybody in the city of Philadelphia. And I believe that the Philadelphia Inquirer has the absolute right to publish John Yoo’s columns if it so chooses — and, in fact, I want the Inquirer to publish compelling perspectives from across the political spectrum, even if I sometimes think those opinions are nuts.

But I also believe that in this case, the Inquirer is making a bad choice.

It’s a bad choice because Yoo himself isn’t quite so ardent about the First Amendment. He did, after all, co-author a secret memo suggesting that freedom of the press could be suspended during the War on Terror.

It’s a bad choice because a man who can’t quite draw a bright line against the crushing of a child’s testicles has frankly demonstrated judgment that places him well outside mainstream discourse.

It’s a bad choice, too, because the Inquirer — like everybody else in the mainstream media these days — has terribly limited resources. The expense of a portion of those limited resources on Yoo’s column is a signal to the public that this is a man worth listening to, with ideas worth contemplating. In most civilized societies, torture enablers are banished to the margins of debate. In Philadelphia, they’re given plum op-ed spots. It’s a damn shame.

Is Specter robbing Pennsylvania of a billion dollars?

Conservative blogger Ross Douthat makes a sharp rebuttal to Arlen Specter’s self-justification on neutering the stimulus. Specter’s efforts, Douthat says, ends up with a result that is neither good stimulus nor good fiscal conservatism — just mushy middle politics as usual that may end up serving nobody.

To read this Arlen Specter op-ed, justifying both the stimulus package and the cuts the “gang of moderates” have attempted to impose, is to encounter a mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn’t a new kind of politics. It’s the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there’s a reasonable case to be made that it’s actively pernicious – that if you can’t shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn’t shrink it at all. There’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s radically different than the one we have now; there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we’re getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They’ve done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they’ve shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right – but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right.

This means that if the damn thing doesn’t work, we won’t even know whom to blame. But it wouldn’t be crazy to start by blaming the centrists.

Young Philly Politics ticks off the Specter-sponsored cuts to the stimulus package, noting that his efforts are “stripping over a billion dollars directly from Pennsylvania.”