Bay Area Alert: Do Not Approach this Dangerous Advocate of State Terror.

Law Professor John Yoo of Berkeley.

America is still is free country out of force of habit, and, partly thanks to John Yoo, our eviscerated Constitution now offers the kind of protection from tyranny that you get ducking from gunfire behind a corpse. That large security forces are not goose-stepping through the streets is partly the Bill of Rights' cultural strength, partly style points, and partly the political weakness of the Bush Administration. If they held credibility and political support, we would be well on our way to Putinism in America.* American democracy would become a nice drop of lemon essence in a bottle of ammonia.

But at this point the Bush Administration could not convince a terrier to chase a squirrel, and we have a chance of rebuilding the essence of freedom in America: specifically - the legal as well as the cultural resistance to tyranny.

It's one thing to be a neo-fascist, to share radical authoritarian, militaristic views, even to teach this agenda to students. That's legal, if titanically immoral. It's quite another to personally subvert the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law by seeking to legalize state torture in the course of official duties.

So let's have Professor John Yoo and his cronies at the Department of Justice arrested. Considering the magnitude of damage to American law, and the breathtaking whitewashing of the practices that normally grace a dictatorship, he should be lucky not to be imprisoned. Start by getting his license to practice law revoked. I'm tired of coddling privileged twerps in high office who corrupt this great nation and wreck its foundation legal principles. Too tough? We've sent people to hard time for 15 years for holding crack. By Yoo's own logic, the next president can send John Yoo up on his personal authority.

*Please note: a gathering of people who share Putin's dictatorial view of the executive branch with Vladmir Putin would logically be called a "Putinnany."