Dahlia Lithwick wrote The radio silence continues as the far right targets Harold Koh.
Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School, is President Obama's pick for Legal Adviser of the State Department. His biography is impressive and I note he "worked as an adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Justice Department." The crazy right wing nuts at Fox are saying he "calls for US courts to apply Sharia law".
Lithwick writes: "And yet by my most recent tally, every one of the anti-Koh rants dutifully repeats a canard that first appeared in a hatchet piece in the New York Post by former Bush administration speechwriter Meghan Clyne. She asserts that Koh believes "Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts." The evidence for her claim? "A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that 'in an appropriate case, he didn't see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.' ""
"The New York Post today published a letter from Robin Reeves Zorthian, who actually organized the Yale Club dinner to which Stein refers. In that letter, Zorthian writes that "the account given by Steve Stein of Dean Koh's comments is totally fictitious and inaccurate" and that she, her husband, "and several fellow alumni ... are all adamant that Koh never said or suggested that sharia law could be used to govern cases in US courts." Why should we believe her and her colleagues over Stein? Well, for one thing, Koh in all his academic articles and many public statements has never said anything to suggest some dogged fealty to sharia"
Another Obama pick is Dawn Johnsen, nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Dept of Justice (which is a Assistant Attorneys General title). She used to have this position in the Clinton administration and is now a constitutional law professor at Indiana University. She faces a possible filibuster ostensibly because the right is saying "that a 20-year-old footnote in a brief Johnsen had authored 'equated pregnancy with slavery'" but really it's because she was an outspoken critic of Bush.
Lithwick says "I'm doubly bothered by the radio silence in the mainstream media because Johnsen and Koh represent two of President Obama's bravest choices. Both have been outspoken critics of Bush administration excesses, and they have done so openly and unequivocally. They were willing to use strong words like torture and illegal long before most of us could bring ourselves to do so...If we cannot bring ourselves to loudly support nominees like Koh and Johnsen, we deserve whoever it is that actually can be confirmed in this climate."
Digby adds: "If there were any chance that Johnson and Koh could actually be denied their places, I would guess that the liberal blogosphere would be intensely engaged. But from what I understand, the filibuster threat on Johnson is just hot air and that nobody takes the nutty Koh critics seriously...It's horrible that people have to put up with this, of course. But the modern conservative movement has a malignant, destructive impulse at its very core that will persist in doing this no matter what. It works for them. Right now, out of power, they don't have the capacity to really affect the outcome but they do it anyway to keep their paranoid loathing simmering until they can once again get traction."
Last night I think I figured how to combat the crap that is Fox News and Limbaugh and their ilk. The right deserves a legitimate source of news they want. They won't start listening to Air America or watch MSNBC, that won't lure them from Fox. But a real news organization that wasn't a propaganda arm might and it would certainly help to raise the level of debate.
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