John Yoo at Berkeley

John Yoo
Good Man


Today's LA Times has an interesting front page piece on Law Professor John Yoo of UC Berkeley.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-john-yoo29-2010mar29,0,31013.story

Being a conservative who teaches at UC-Irvine, it is always interesting to read about other conservatives at US universities. Of course, there are some differences between Yoo and I. First of all, Yoo is a well-known and controversial figure. He was one off the Justice Department lawyers who gave the Bush Administration guidelines for interrogating captured terror suspects, which led to water boarding, which led to plots being uncovered and lives being saved. I am just an insignificant adjunct (part-time) teacher in the UCI Ext teaching English as a Foreign language to foreign students. As my readers know, I am no academic though I have been teaching ESL since 1995 and have written three books. Basically, I'm just a broken-down old DEA agent-and damn proud of it.

Secondly, no matter what you may read about UCI, Berkeley is a far more radical campus and always has been. Most kids at UCI don't have time for the protests and such. Our problem, of which I have written extensively, is pretty specific and limited to a couple of topics.

Finally, my colleagues in the office where I work are more diverse than the average university professor. Most have only masters degrees, most are well-traveled, have lived overseas, speak more than one language and are married with spouses from other nationalities or races. Some are liberal. Some are conservative. Some are moderate. They are all pretty tolerant of other views.

The article describes how Yoo views the disdain he gets from liberal colleagues with amusement. What else can you do when you are at Berkeley? Wherever Yoo has gone in academia since he left government, there have been those who have lobbied for his firing. A few years ago, he came to speak at UCI. The speech was shut down by unruly students and faculty who couldn't bear to hear things they didn't agree with-and didn't want anyone else to hear them either.

Sadly that is a fact of life in academia.

For my money, John Yoo is an American patriot. He also has had the opportunity to do something most of his lefty colleagues haven't done-get a little life experience outside of the ivy halls. Most of his critics haven't done diddly-squat to defend this country. I would be willing to bet someone a beer most of the nation's law professors have never even tried a case in court. In fact, I bet there aren't more than a handful that have had MY experience in courtrooms-and I am no lawyer; what I have done is testify in hundreds of trials and grand juries as well as sit at the prosecutor's table as the lead case agent (investigator) throughout numerous trials.

So there sits John Yoo at Berkeley chuckling at the zany liberal faculty who yell and scream about free speech as long as it is their own-not some one's like John Yoo. In fact, the only surprise in the article and negative point about Yoo is that his father-in-law is Peter Arnett.

Of course, the liberal Times points out that although Berkeley is dominated by liberals, they have become more diverse in the faculties of engineering, computer science and law (big deal). Of course, they didn't say anything about the humanities. That is where the problem lies. They are infested with far-left America-hating, Israel-hating, Christian-hating, wine sipping, beer-hating.....

Well, you get the point.

IN CONCLUSION....



Kudos to John Yoo and may all his academic critics get testicular cancer.

Yes, that's right.