John Yoo!: I Hate You!

I don't hate many people on the Right, my political adopted homeland, but i think John McCain gots company cause now I hate my second Republican: John Yoo. Plus, I can't stop saying "John Yoo! I hate You!" try it, its addictive, my god. Anyways, I hate John Yoo, not you, just John Yoo, for the following reasons,

1. I watched this interview with nice-guy preppy interviewer of the Right, the Hoover Instuition's Peter Robinson, the Reagan speechwriter who coined the sentence, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" at an enviously young age and has since hosted the one time PBS, now even better NRO hosted, show, Uncommon Knowledge, which to me all true conservatives watch regularly,

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NjI4ZWFmZTQ5ZWUyNzVhMjZhYzliM2JlYjc3ZTdlZGY=

2. Here's my charcheter sketch of John Yoo: As you can see if you watch all 5 unusually unlively segments of the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Yoo, the man is such a neocon, so totally preoccupied with foreign policy and the "vital importance" of the Afganistan and Iraqi wars, that he has, quitely (though, really, whose asking?), morphed into a Obamacon as he divuldges here). I mean you really do get the sense from the manifestly unstimulating, John Yoo, that he cares about anything outside foreign policy, politically, at all. He exsplains to Robinson that he thinks Obama is going to go down as a great president because alone, he "realized Afganistan wasn't another Vietnam" and has gone hawkish. Now A. Afganistan is Vietnam exactly and it shouldn't take much more than Berkely proffership to realize that and B. even if Yoo was right and the Afgan war was this hugely important war as the Neocons hype it to be it is going to be only a segment of Obama's legend. Yoo reminds me of a mediocre follower, true beliver type who comes to the scene to late, like a Reaganite graduating college in 1996 but with an ideology that is terrible for America and self evidently weak unlike Reagonomics aka free markets. John Yoo seems like the only frustrated youngish product of the College Republicans brigade in America to have not just liked George W. Bush (which isn't something few so called active younger Republicans even did post-2004) but saw George W. Bush as Peter Robinson and David Frum and Ann Coulter, saw Ronald Wilson Reagan, a far far superior and more admirable man and politician. It seems, I'm almost certain of it, that Yoo was a very smart asian kid (you know the type) who has little talent or flair for talking especially public speaking but can kick your ass at a Geometry test, who is outside being incredibly gifted at Math is the model Everyday Average Kid and who thinks politics and liteature which white males tend to be suspetible towards at a early age than asian males. Suddenly, the John Yoo i have erected in my imagination goes to Stanford Unviersity just anothe brick in the great wall of American Education that is the Asian-American college student, having had hardly any intrest in politics, writing, liteature, music, or the like at all. At college, he finds his smartness, steely work ethic and traditional Chritian mores alienate him from dumb pot smoking leftists: a Republican is born! Yoo, his intrest in mathematics fading, applies his steely Asian-American Christian work ethic to a new field of intrest and work, the Republican Machine. Accept with one caveat, John Yoo is going to college in the post-Reagan era, post-bloated welfare state, post-huge taxes, post-hippies America. During Yoo's college days at Stanford, Clinton is in office, John Yoo's mind like the nation itself is no longer so focused on internal, domestic issues because the hippies are off the street (and in the establishment), the hige welfare state is being somewhat dismantled, taxes are not so high, immigration is not yet a big issue, the decline of morals doesn't attract John Yoo or any youngsters energies, so there is a huge void for some conservatives like John yoo and that void is filled by foreign policy, the fight against depotism, spreading of democracy and fighting of terrorism. Remember, at this time, during the political dogdays of the Clinton adminstration on the American right which was to an extent, save the brief 94' revivial, neutralized and partly co-opted by Bill Clinton with the help of the brazen if brazen aide of Jesse Helm's former political strategist, Dick Morris-who would resign only to rise back to promimence on the right after the curtain was raised on his ludicrous and often hilarous escapades with a high class D.C. rent-a-chick. The inevtiable lull for conservativtism in the years after immediatly following the twin triumphs of the Reagan years, the ending of the Cold War and the economic Reagan revoultion, had opened up the way forward for those strange guests within the Republican Party, the Neo-Cons, to hijack the Republican Party. Hense the rapid rise of the flagship neoconservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, which is launched in the mid-90's by David Brooks and the less talented, Ivy league, sons of neoconservatisms two founding fathers, Bill Kristol (son of Irving) & John Podhoretz (son of Norman). The Weekly Standard was symbolic not only of a resurgent neoconservtive movement during the 90's but of a mainstream rebranding of neoconservatism as no longer just a almost exsplicity ethno-centric, in this case, Jewish, movement.
The Weekly Standard would supplant Commentary magazine, father Norman Podhoretz's exsplicitly jewish centered magazine which began as the magazine of the American Jewish Commititee until Norman Podhoretz, a friend, at one time, to the leftist celebritys of NYC such as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg and the Trillings, took the magazine toe the left in reaction to the tumultious hippy student movement in the 1960's.
So John Yoo became a Neo-con young true believer, with not only a bookshelf full of books by Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Sidney Hook but his very own magazine, the Weekly Standard, just like the Grover Norquists and David Frums who grew of age during the late 70's and ages had William F. Buckley books and Nation Review. For non-whites in America it is hard to leave the left without feeling a sense of betraying the race. I don't know how much of this pathology is present among asians but I know it is present and wouldn't be suprised if neoconservatism was the perfect for Yoo ideolgically because it could give him an identity (e.g. "I'm a neoconservative...that's reall grown up & cool."), a mission, and also a exsplanation to Asians who might think he wanted to be white by being a Republican, he could always say as neo-cons love to say that, he was part of the "good conservtive movement not the racist, nativist, old right of Robert Taft" that carried about immigration and keeping America out Europe's wars and mantaining American white Christian civilization. So off Johnny Yoo goes to some senators office or think tank in Wasshington D.C.. He takes the Matt Latatimer route and finds himself, just essentially naother college Conservative "geek" at the top end of the US State Department and find yourself at the center of a firestorm over executive power in regards to the Iraq war. Some provocative and, if I may say so, rather ridiclous statements in your memos about the Commander in Chiefs executive priviledges exsplode on the left. In these memos John Yoo deems that the executive has the power to declare war without Congressional or Senatorial approval and many other absurd statements. PBS does a Frontline episode inwhich Yoo is a central focus (he is interview in it making some the type of ludicrous constuitional assertions I reffer to). According to the Frontline documentrary which seems honest enough, Yoo was essentially used in the drum roll to war in Iraq in 2003 basically given the job of being in-house constuinal yes-man for the Bush adminstration. Its seems as if Dick Cheney or Wolfwitz gave one of his Strausian friends at whatever law school John Yoo was teaching constuinial law at the time and said "Look, do you have any young, wide-eyed, neocon true belivers on the Law School staff whose crazy enough to believe the President can go to war with the Senate declaring war?" and they had returned the name John Woo. I would even go so far as to say and i could easily be wrong, that Yoo was kind of brought into the Bush adminstration as kind of the desiginated constuitional fall guy.
And what was and is (because no one is more consititant than neocons) John Yoo's Constuinal law? Yoo is a living-document "conservative" legal guy who thinks that we can go to war without a declaration of war on the grounds that "we've had alot of wars without declarations" and that dispirate impact law is da bomb. The only bright spot in Yoo's constuinalism is his defence of waterboarding. John Yoo has rehabilated himself very well finding himself a job as a proffesor at Berkely of all places and publishing two books. The first book is just another forgettable Bushie White House memoir entitled "War By Another Name" and the recent book, "Crises and Command" which is far better in my view for its an actual history extending from Washington to Bush. Yoo's arguments are so weak as you can see here that it seems almost certain that he was a mediocre Bush adminstration buercrat that was shot into the spotlight by accident and was wiley enough to squeeze a book deal out of that. Yoo has the terrible job shared by the neocon movement of trying to exsplain why America needs to stay in two useless wars in Iraq and Afganistan for another decades, talking about 9/11 till its worn out beyond belief. Yoo as a indivual is innocent enough but insidious for what he reprsents. He reprasents the part of the GOP that is obbessed to an bizarre degree with neocon hawkishness and foreign policy epitomized by Rudy Gilullani and Glen Beck and the other segment of the party which is obbessed with talking about 9/11 and big goverment alone.