Oliver Willis

The main thing you must understand about conservative legal theory, is that it is like the plot of a movie starring a Playboy Playmate or a Buffalo Bills Superbowl ring: It does not exist.

It is simply made up, the fevered fantasy of some jagoff who has a Ronald Reagan poster on his wall and prays at the altar of George W. Bush.

From the NY Times profile of Jack Goldsmith:

The heroes of Goldsmith’s book — his historical models of presidential leadership in wartime — are Presidents Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them, as Arthur Schlesinger noted in his essay “War and the Constitution,” “were lawyers who, while duly respecting their profession, regarded law as secondary to political leadership.” In Goldsmith’s view, an indifference to the political process has ultimately made Bush a less effective wartime leader than his greatest predecessors. Surprisingly, Bush, who is not a lawyer, allowed far more legalistic positions in the war on terror to be adopted in his name, without bothering to try to persuade Congress and the public that his positions were correct. “I don’t know if President Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making,” Goldsmith told me. “It’s hard to know how he would know.”

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

The other thing you should learn is that like Colin Powell, Paul Bremer, and numerous others who have served in this administration in the civilian and military leadership, Jack Goldsmith is a coward. They are cowards who wait until hundreds of people are dead, the constitution is already urinated on, and the honor of the United States besmirched before they meekly raise their hands and clear their throats in protest. They are much like a getaway driver who guns the engine as the perpetrator hops in the car, blood running from his arms, then protests later that he didn’t realize anybody had gotten hurt. They are almost as morally repugnant as the violators.