Yoo, Bolton and Saltsman Lead GOP Irony Machine
Beaten and battered, the Republican Party long ago was reduced to an irony-producing machine. But for sheer productivity, Monday's hypocrisy generation by leading lights of the conservative movement was impressive. In the span of 24 hours, would-be RNC chairman and distributor of "Barack the Magic Negro" Chip Saltsman announced his party needed to improve its outreach to minority communities. Meanwhile, John Yoo and John Bolton, two men who helped gut the Geneva Conventions, called for Congress to uphold its role in approving international treaties.
Saltsman's jaw-dropper came during a conclave of hopefuls seeking to lead the Republican National Committee, an event hosted by right-wing uber operator Grover Norquist. (Among Norquist's own recent contributions to the inventory of Republican irony was his November charge that Democrats are responsible for the Bush recession.) In December, Saltsman tried to woo RNC decision makers by sending each a CD containing the "Barack the Magic Negro" parody popularized among Republican hatemongers by Rush Limbaugh. But during Monday's pseudo-debate, Saltsman offered this diagnosis of the party's record-breaking failure among minority voters:
"We have done a very poor job in communicating any message from the Republican Party."
Meanwhile, Yoo and Bolton took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to launch a preemptive strike against Barack Obama's commitment to renewed international diplomacy. Hoping to block a new, post-Kyoto global climate change consensus and other international agreements, Yoo and Bolton laughably argued Congress must "restore the Senate's treaty power":
The Constitution's Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments. The clause will likely be tested by Barack Obama's administration, as the new president and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, led by the legal academics in whose circles they have long traveled, contemplate binding down American power and interests in a dense web of treaties and international bureaucracies.
Like past presidents, Mr. Obama will likely be tempted to avoid the requirement that treaties must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate.
Among those presidents, of course, is George W. Bush. His myriad evasions of the Senate's treaty making role includes the recent Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) recently inked with the Maliki government in Baghdad. Ignoring demands from Congressional Democrats that the extended the U.S. force presence in Iraq be subject to approval by the Senate, President Bush by executive agreement unilaterally committed American troops to stay through 2011.
Of course, John Yoo's true specialty is abrogating treaties already signed by the United States. In his role as head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo aggressively supported the Bush administration's January 2002 conclusion that the Geneva Conventions had been "rendered quaint" in the war on terror. As he made clear three years later, Yoo didn’t merely believe the terrorist threat rendered "obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.'' As it turns out, Yoo's unwavering belief in unlimited presidential war powers led him not only to ignore Geneva's prohibitions on torture, but to author his now-infamous standard for treatment of detainees. In the August 2002 Bybee memo he largely wrote, Yoo argued that torture:
"...must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Of course, Yoo believes that the President's powers as commander-in-chief trump any act of Congress, whether an international treaty or domestic legislation. He expressed that extremist view in a controversial September 25, 2001 memo and again in even blunter language on PBS while discussing the President's illegal NSA domestic surveillance program:
"I think that there's a law greater than FISA, which is the Constitution, and part of the Constitution is the president's commander-in-chief power. Congress can't take away the president's powers in running war."
As for John Bolton, the former UN ambassador is no friend of international institutions or American multilateralism of any kind. Bolton, of course, famously joked that removing 10 floors of the UN "wouldn't make a bit of difference." When he isn't advocating that Senate Republicans obstruct Barack Obama's diplomatic initiatives, he's calling for Egypt and Jordan to annex Palestinian territories in Gaza and West Bank or reiterating his endless pleas to attack Iran. (On December 29th, Bolton suggested that the U.S. should use the conflict in Gaza as a pretext for bombing Iran.) And when it comes to Bolton's infidelity to American treaty obligations, his scheming to undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) accord is just one example.
All of which made Monday just another day at the office for the Republican irony machine. While Yoo and Bolton insist Barack Obama must get two thirds of the Senate to bless treaties they would no doubt subsequently advocating flouting anyway, the race-baiting Chip Saltsman chides his party for failed outreach to minorities. But Tuesday isn't over yet; there's still time for President Bush to repeat his statement last month that "while the Israelis and Palestinians have not yet produced an agreement, they have made important progress."
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Yoo is a war criminal. He shouldn't be lecturing anyone about the legality of treaties for years.
Posted by Prentice on January 10, 2009 9:33 PM