By GottaLaff

Via L.A. Times Letters to the Editor (bolding mine):

Re “Yoo feels at ease among opposition,” March 29

It’s pretty obvious why John Yoo likes living in Berkeley.

He can delude himself into thinking that most of those who disapprove of his actions are “self-indulgent, pot-smoking hippies.”

He imagines himself a quasi-martyr living among these “troglodytes.”

He may be a bright lawyer, but his introspective properties are clearly deficient.

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It is good to know that Californians can sleep well at night because John Yoo, professor of law at the University of California’s Boalt Hall law school, believes he is the “shining beacon of capitalism” — while employed by the state of California, accepting state funds for his salary and accruing time for his taxpayer-funded retirement.

How does one spell “hypocrite”?

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Torture usually leaves psychological scars that never heal and that subject its victims to lifelong illnesses and abuse, and can even lead to suicide.

Yoo excluded this important aspect from his definition of torture in order to make torture more acceptable to the Bush administration and to advance his career, despite the fact that the effects of torture on human psychology have been well documented during the past 100 years.

My original piece on the article referred to in these letters is here.

By GottaLaff

John Yoo, one of the architects of the “torture memos”, is employed at U.C. Berkeley. He says he is very happy teaching at Boalt Hall School of Law.

He seemed perfectly happy when he sparred with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

He seemed perfectly happy when he wrote the memos, too. Weeee!

He now seems happy to throw around words like “Marxism” and “troglodytes” when he describes the very people from whom he’s happy to take happy checks from and with whom he continues his happy employment.

He seems more than happy to continue to defend the “success” derived from torture.

He’s bursting with happy when he sees himself as a “shining beacon of … democracy.”

Yoo lie!

“I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism,” Yoo observes, sipping iced tea in the faculty club lounge, a wan smile registering the discomfort of colleagues walking by en route to the bar.

He sees his neighbors as the human figures of “a natural history museum of the 1960s,” the Telegraph Avenue tableau of a graying, long-haired, pot-smoking counterculture stuck in the ideology’s half-century-old heyday.

“It’s like looking at the panoramic displays of troglodytes sitting around the campfire with their clubs. Here, it’s tie-dye and marijuana. It’s just like the 1960s, with the Vietnam War still to protest.”

He’s just one happy, clappy guy… who just doesn’t get it:

Yoo sees the investigation as political score-settling by those who disagreed with the tough war-on-terror policies of the Bush White House. [...]

He sees the persistent protests of his fitness to teach law as the campaign of a radical community intolerant of views that don’t accord with their own.

Yes, that’s it. Brutalizing people, often innocent ones, had nothing to do with it. Invading a sovereign country who did not invade us, killing thousands upon thousands, in a fraudulent war is just “score-settling”. It’s all about our “intolerance”.

But at least he’s happy.

In fact, he’s not only happy, he’s “amused”:

Yoo seems more amused than uncomfortable as the center of controversy.

Isn’t that droll?

Yes, Torture Guy is having a good chuckle over objections to his crafting the legal justification for killing, maiming, and psychologically destroying fellow human beings.

That’s some sense of humor.

Here’s something else Mr. Happy is jolly about:

Yoo doesn’t rule out a return to public service should Republican conservatives regain the White House.

Oh goody. If that’s not a reason for utter ecstasy, I don’t know what is.

Yoo seems at peace living in Berkeley, even though he disparages the community as an enclave of self-satisfied extremists intolerant of those who think outside the liberal mind-set.

This is a man at peace, after what he did, after his own intolerance for, you know, our system of justice, after shredding the Constitution.

At peace.

In that case, may Yoo rest in peace.