My interpretation: it's not perjury if you cross your fingers

Yesterday Amy Goodman hosted a debate between Cass Sunstein, apparently the partially-animated zombie of a recently dead sensible liberal, and Glenn Greenwald.  Sunstein's comatose recitation of conventional talking points has to be seen to be believed, but I warn you: you can actually feel your brain transforming into tapioca as he speaks.  Delicious, maybe, but still deeply unpleasant.

Here's a sample, as Sunstein drones on about why it would be imprudent to impeach George Bush for, you know, breaking the law:

CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President’s adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President’s position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it’s an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President’s power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush’s view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong—let’s be very clear on that—but the notion that it’s an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That’s high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.

It's just not the same without the plodding certitude he imparts to every syllable, but still: is Sunstein, a former University of Chicago (and soon to be Harvard) law professor, seriously suggesting that we should allow criminals in high office to go unpunished based on their professed interpretation of the law?  Is he honestly unaware that the most serious crimes committed by the political class in this country are regularly accompanied by tortured legal justifications intended to give them a patina of legitimacy?  And that the Bush administration in particular has rationalized its every crime as a legitimate exercise of presidential power?  As I listened to him, that's certainly the impression I got.  In Sunstein's world, even the peerlessly corrupt Bush coterie—a group that regularly wipes its collective ass with legal principles—is just a set of earnest public servants acting in good faith, erring only in their sincere but misguided interpretations of the law.

I can't bring myself to dissect or even quote him further, so you'll have to go to the tape if you want the full performance (and if you want to hear Greenwald's evisceration of the boggleworthy bits above).  But there are two other things you should know: first, Sunstein is an adviser to Barack Obama; and second, he just married Samantha "other people's genocide is a problem from hell" Power, herself a former Obama adviser.

(If I seem a bit harsh toward Sunstein, who no doubt pets dogs and loves his mother, it's because he epitomizes the bureaucratic apologist for power whose bloodless analyses provide the intellectual cover for state crimes that are anything but bloodless.  Real people suffer and die as a direct result of just these kinds of sophistries.)

Comments

[The Dead Bodies]

"other people's genocide is a problem from hell"

Hey, maybe Power's new hubby can explain to her that those other people probably have a legal interpretation of their power to commit "genocide".

[Phil]

And what, pray tell, is a high crime or misdemeanor? A blowjob? Sunstein's thinking is perverse. Impeachment is a political remedy, not a criminal one.

[Thomas Daulton]

I don't think you're being too harsh on Sunstein at all. I posted this comment at IOZ, and I'll briefly repeat it: Glenn is right when he said, on his blog, a week before the debate, {paraphrasing}, 'things like FISA are not issues where the Republicans are attacking and the Democrats are resisting. They are co-ordinated attacks emanating from the political class in Washington, working together, versus the rest of the citizenry. And they should be responded to as such.'

Sunstein's responses seemed to fit Greenwald's model absolutely perfectly: here was an insider politico, defending his colleagues (on both sides of the putative "aisle"), at the expense of truth, principle, logic, and language.

[John Caruso]

Phil: Sunstein was very specific about that: "I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t criminalize crimes. Crimes are against the law." Apparently it takes a law degree from Harvard to attain such dazzling heights of insight.