The Philly Inquirer: Where the Last Eight Years Go to Die
So I’m beginning to think that Brian Tierney’s sole motivation for buying the Philadelphia Inquirer was to kill the newspaper. That certainly explains a lot, from taking huge bonuses while the paper foundered into bankruptcy to his peculiar picks for editorial contributors: namely, the most discredited names in the right wing nuthouse. and Phawker reminds us about one of the WORST yet: John Yoo, now a biweekly contributor to the Stinky.
I’ve written before about the decision to hire Rick Santorum, a candidate so universally reviled in Pennsylvania, he lost to Bob Casey, a man with all the charisma of a Wonder Bread sandwich chased down with a glass of unflavored gelatin. Here in Philly, a city where Democrats are an overwhelming majority, Santorum was routed. Did i say “routed”? I meant “crushed like the insignificant little cockroach he is”, losing by 84.1%.
You’d expect an intelligent publisher would say to himself, “I need to have balance on my op-ed pages, so perhaps i will find some conservative voices who have something interesting to say.” Not so Brian Tierney, who has clearly decided that its best to hire to worst of the worst, the most boring, the most trite, the most hysterical, and above all the most unreadable.
Which brings us to today’s topic: John “Ball Buster” Yoo, the new bi-weekly torturer columnist for the Inquirer. And here he is, bloviating about Obama’s choices for the Supreme Court:
Obama promises something different. In 2007, candidate Obama declared that his judges would “recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African American or gay or disabled or old.” When he announced Souter’s retirement, the president stated he would nominate “someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” Empathy is “an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”
In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts compared judges to neutral umpires in a baseball game. Sen. Obama did not vote to confirm Roberts or Alito, but now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game, or to the idea of a rule of law that is blind to the identity of the parties before it.
Empathy has a proper place in other areas of life, such as medicine or charitable work. And the law does take account of a party’s identity when necessary – in deciding whether someone has suffered racial or gender discrimination, for example. But judges should not apply these rules differently in individual cases because of the skin color, or sex, or religion of the plaintiff or defendant.
You may recall that John Yoo is one of the authors of the torture memos, a man who will quite likely be convicted of war crimes by the same judge who nailed Pinochet. His work has been highly criticized for shoddy research and deliberately twisting the law, and providing ex post facto rationales for torture. He has no business in Philadelphia’s community, and certainly no place on our editorial pages. And before some wag says “of course Brendan doesn’t want Yoo to be in the Inky: after all, brendan’s a liberal!”, I can name several conservatives I enjoy reading, even if i disagree with them. Daniel Larison. Andrew Sullivan. David Brooks. Even David fucking Frum is tolerable.
But none of these writers have the cachet that entices Brian Tierney. No, to be chosen for the Inky’s op-ed, it’s not enough to be patronizing, boring, and cliched. You must be miserable enough that NO ONE wants to read you, or you won’t pass muster for Tierney’s actual goal: destroying his own paper.
I mean why else would he publish characters that are so crappy no one, but NO ONE, cares what they have to say?
May 12th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
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