In other words, Obama just put one of Yoo's harshest critics - and one who kept his criticism on purely intellectual-honesty type grounds - into Yoo's old job, doubtless with the direction "clean things up".

This - assuming Marty can put into policy what he's been putting on the blogs - is a hugely positive development.

More than that, I've been saying a lot of the same things as Balkin and Lederman and, it turns out, Johnsen, only I've been doing it between trying to keep my head above water, financially, in an environment where what I've had to say has been ... less than fully welcome and, more important, less than relevant to the issues at hand (like, settling that case, or wrangling with the Clerk because the papers didn't fit the only form the Judge has the mental capacity to recognize, or working out a scheme to reduce to a second DUI the case against a client who's gotten their third, for the 39th time this calendar year).

Of course, I didn't have the benefit of having gotten great grades from a top-drawer law school, and a clerkship and professorship and I've been out of school going on 20 years, so I have no or next to no hope of rising beyond "private practice, in debt but getting by".  I learned my law in a good school which produces good lawyers who are rarely, if ever, expected to rise to the levels of the jobs we're discussing.  My (and I) classmates are, by and large, the nuts-and-bolts lawyers who do the legal work for individuals who get hurt in accidents, need wills, have a crazy relative who needs a guardian, want to buy and sell houses, and get picked up for some low-level offense or crime.  I learned how to practice law and try cases in the time-honored way:  "between spoons of soup", as the saying goes, with a now-departed mentor who was a classics scholar, a one-man debating team, and a cigar-seller's dream.

But, more to the point, I recognized immediately that what Yoo, Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney and all the rest of their lawyerly thugs were selling was wrong.  On moral, ethical, legal and constitutional grounds.  The first two were not a godd basis for argument because they had no importance to them - big surprise that self-proclaimed Christians were hypocrites and liars.  The third, they could and did manipulate.  

The last, I learned courtesy of a couple sessions on military law - required in your officer's basic course - and self-study of the Constitution and American (and world) history.  Anyone with eyes could have seen the fallacies and errors they were spouting.  But, it was and is a measure of the absolute degeneracy of both the political and moral culture of Washington and the country, as well as the absolute abandonment of scruples by those who would rise in the legal profession beyond the level where I work, that those fallacies and errors reached the level of received Truth, and the best whores among them rose the fastest and farthest.

I am neither so generous nor so merciful as to wish ill to the perpetrators - active or passive -of the wrongs that flowed from Bush's Oval Office.  Nor am I so naive as to expect that they will get what they truly deserve - the slime coating them is too thick to allow a firm grasp.