Missing the Point

So evidently, John Yoo -- he of Bush administration torture memo fame -- was recently on The Daily Show with John Stewart. And evidently, John Stewart failed to nail him.

I know this not because I saw the interview (though I'll probably eventually watch it), but because I read this article about it in Slate magazine. I would probably be disappointed if I watched it, but I'm even more disappointed by how Christopher Beam tries to make Stewart's failure seem inevitable.

Beam's point is that it is impossible to nail Yoo because (he doesn't use these words, but others have) "he was just doing his job." His argument is that You can say that he didn't encourage torture; he merely gave a legal opinion about whether a president can authorize torture or not.

That is such a cop-out. John Yoo is not simply a lawyer. He is not even firstly a lawyer. He's a person, a human being.

The way to nail someone in this situation is not to get into the specifics of who did what and whether that implies responsibiliy or not. The way to do it is to back up, way up, and force them to look at the big picture from the perspective of a human being.

If I were interviewing him, here's what I would say: So, John Yoo, you were the lawyer who wrote these memos. How does that make you feel? You will go down in history as being part of this dark and evil period in American history. How does your stomach react to that? Sure, if you hadn't been there, they would have found someone else to do what they wanted done. But they didn't; they had you. How does it feel to be that person, the one who actually did it?

The point is that you don't nail him for the technicality; you nail him for either not realizing what was going on in the big picture, or not caring. Either he was duped, or he's a really bad person. Either way, to talk about feelings and legacies and big picture would bring that out.

Maybe I should call John Stewart.