John Yoo is the Bush administration lawyer who authored its legal excuses for torturing prisoners. At first, he made a show of disliking President Trump, but like most Republicans he soon came around. Yoo now has a book out on how wonderful Trump is. At Reason Magazine, Gene Healy takes it to pieces: it's not only as morally unpleasant as Yoo's earlier work, but strewn with factual errors.
Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an "attack on Sam Houston's forces along the Rio Grande." (Zachary Taylor's, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama "launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons." (Er, he didn't.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he's just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn't in it.
The rest is "the president should be king, unless he's a Democrat". You get the impression that Yoo is a mediocrity who was just there are the right time to end up as the "torture memo guy" and will adhere to whatever or whoever gives him lunch.
John Yoo: The Man Who Would Make The President King [Reason]
