Prescience Revisited

I keep doing this. My instincts must be good.

It seems, after my comments on his nomination yesterday, the real Mukasey stood up. See these comments from Andrew Sullivan, which echo a lot of what I'm seeing after his most recent testimony. Quoting Mark Kleiman:

I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees. But if Mukasey won't say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his "Article II powers," then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn't read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he's done his homework.

It's deeper than that -- it's not a matter of "doing his homework." Any idiot should know at this point that Bush is not going to nominate a candidate for any major position who is going to be independent, and certainly not one who has any sympathy for the American system of government. That's a given.

Update:

Catching up on some other posts on Mukasey, I can still claim to be prescient (or at least fully in tune with the Zeitgeist). See this one by Marty Lederman and this one by Brian Tamanaha and this one by David Luban, all at Balkinization. From Luban's post:

"Is waterboarding constitutional?" he was asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, in one of today’s sharpest exchanges.

"I don’t know what is involved in the technique," Mr. Mukasey replied. "If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."

First off, I can't figure out how any person in this country, particularly a sitting judge, can legitimately claim not to know what's involved in waterboarding -- as if it hasn't been described in detail on the Internet, in congressional testimony, even in the MSM. That alone should disqualify Mukasey from any high-level administration post, even in an administration that values ignorance as highly as this one does.

Secondly, an "if/then" answer is simply not acceptable. Granted, the question was badly phrased, and I can see Mukasey's motivation for sticking to the question as asked. That doesn't make me any more comfortable with the idea of having another parsing lawyer as AG. It's that kind of thinking that got us into this mess.

From any rational perspective, this guy's a total loser.