Of course Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee needs to be removed from the bench, but he probably won't be, because Americans LIKE torture

Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" didn't get where he is today by being either decent or honorable, any more than Sunshine Desserts baron C.J. (the ineffable John Barron) did. Here Reggie Perrin (the great Leonard Rossiter), well on his way to a nervous breakdown, sets out to demand a holiday from his boss. Instead, C.J. offers an afternoon off, from which he assures Reggie he'll "return a different man." "That's what Mrs. C.J. and I do," he says, "and we return different men."

by Ken

I may have been unfair to Pat Leahy. I noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman on Tuesday said to reporters, about Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee (as Ryan Grim reported on Huffpost):

The decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign. And if he is a decent and honorable person, he will resign.

As much as I admire Senator Pat, so often he talks the talk, the good talk, the exactly right talk, but then somehow vaporizes when it comes to fighting the fight. And so my first thought was: Oh Pat, you dreamer! In this lost world of decency and honor with which you're apparently in telepathic contact, of course Judge Jay would resign. However, we live in the real world, where the Jayman knows that he didn't get on the bench by doing anything that could be called by the most charitable stretch either decent or honorable, and so why on earth would he be tempted to commit a decent or honorable act that would get him off the bench?

And all I could think of was C.J., Reggie's old boss at Sunshine Desserts in the immortal Britcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Why, if anyone had had the temerity to mention decency or honor in C.J.'s hearing, you just know he would have responded, "I didn't get where I am today by being decent or honorable."

In fairness to Senator Leahy, though, it turns out that he wasn't being quite so spontaneously dreamy in making his appeal to Judge Jay's decency and honor. He was in fact responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch's Monday rejection of the idea of impeachment, declaring that Jay the Torture Guy is "one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet."

Say what? One of the most honorable people I'll ever meet???

Um, no, Senator Hatch. It may well be that "Honk If You Love Torture" Jay is one of the most honorable people you've ever met. I've watched your all-too-public career for a long time now, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the sleazily opportunistic Torture Guy is a class act by the standard of the peeps you hang with. But that's not much of a standard.

What we are learning about Judge Jay's record heading the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- and by this I mean his willingness, or rather eagerness, to give the war criminals and Constitution-shredders of the Bush regime whatever legal cover they craved on torture or anything else -- is about as far from "honorable" as you can get. The word that pops to mind is nauseating.

IRONIC SIDEBAR: SPEAKING OF THE OLC

Along with defenses of the absolutely indefensible Jay the Torture Guy, what we're hearing from the Loony Right now is continued character assassination of President Obama's nominee to head the incredibly important OLC, whose charter is to provide the administration with the most accurate and authoritative legal opinions obtainable by the best legal minds, in other words the exact opposite of what the Bush regime sought, and got, from the fraudulent, craven, ideological-hack, butt-licking-careerist shysters it stocked the OLC with.

By all accounts (from non-insane people, that is), Obama designee Dawn Johnsen really is one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet, and she possesses one of the finest legal minds. (And by this I don't mean the kind of "fine legal mind" we've always been told Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia possesses, which -- as anybody who reads his whacked-out opinions knows -- is in fact a cesspool of ultra-right-wing bigotry and prejudices underlying a borderline, if not across-the-border, sociopathic contempt for anyone who isn't rich and powerful.) And yet the Right, as currently personified by one of the truly nuttiest and vilest hacks to befoul the Senate, the loathsome James Inhofe, and scum-sucking Iowa Rep. Steve King, without acknowledging the role played by the Bush regimista OLC in laying waste to the Constitution and overturning our system of laws, continues to vilify Johnsen.

But I digress. Should Judge Jay be gotten the hell off the bench? Of course! And as more behind-the-scenes muck from the slime-filled Bush DoJ oozes out, there's certainly a chance that the scumbag will reach his humiliation threshold and slither off behind whatever rock he originally emerged from.

My only reservation about the impeachment process as applied to Judge Jay is that we're talking now about something the judge did before he was put on the bench. That's all supposed to be handled in his confirmation hearings. Can it qualify now as "an impeachable offense"?

Senator Leahy may have answered this question, even though he wasn't addressing it directly, when he said in the same chinwag with reporters Tuesday:

The fact is, the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee did not tell the truth. If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed.

The guy can hardly earn a free pass for having concealed this crucial information. Former Nazi concentration-camp guards who failed to disclose this activity when they applied for entry to the U.S. were nevertheless subject to deportation.

The case against Judge Jay is already pretty damning, and I suspect it's only going to get worse. Nevertheless, I think there's a good chance he's going to beat the rap. Why? Because, as a wise listserv colleague reminded us the other day, the American public by and large isn't at all offended by the idea of torture, and in fact to a large degree thinks it's a fine idea for when we need life-saving information immediately from bad guys. They don't know how heavily the odds are stacked against torture yielding any information of value.

We are talking, yes, about the 24 model, the 24 mentality, and the 24 audience. Don't get me started on that! But when people of the supposed intelligence of "Holy Joe" Lieberman subscribe to this wacko crock (and you owe it to yourself to read David Neiwert's Tuesday Crooks and Liars post "Holy Joe still loves him some torture"), is it surprising that people who watch that unmitigated pile of crap -- the dumbest scripts in TV history backed up by the worst acting and direction (Reginald Perrin is not only way funnier but way more realistic, a veritable slice of life by comparison) -- have not the slightest sympathy when we lefties froth about torture?

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