Liz Cheney Channels Frank Luntz, badly

Versus and D.A. have been following the Liz Cheney web-ad smear on unnamed lawyers hired into Obama's Dept. of Justice. She claims -- perhaps correctly -- that these lawyers had worked at firms where other lawyers (or perhaps even the unnamed lawyers in question) defended terrorist suspects.

Setting aside the ridiculous assertion that equates a lawyer to his or her client -- which all thinking people recognize as stupid -- and further equates simply working in a firm that acted as zealous legal counsel for accused terror suspects, Versus sees a more insidious logic at work, whether Liz meant it or not.

While many GOP lawyer / Bush Admininistration officials have attacked the core message as an unprovoked and foolish attack on the legal professions' canon of ethics, those same parties have taken the even more brash step to conflate Liz's stupid charges with attacks on John Yoo and other Bush DoJ lawyers who found the legal basis to support torture. Quite frankly, Versus and D.A. don't think Liz is smart enough to set the table for others like that. While the GOP mouthpieces -- taking a page from The Luntz's playbook -- regularly use false conflation of issues to deceive the audience, this trick is too clever by half for Versus.

John Yoo and others these GOP mouthpieces are defending (while attack Liz) worked at DoJ. The unnamed lawyers Liz calls, in essence, terrorists, for being legally the appointed representatives for accused terrorist at trial, also now work at DoJ. All are lawyers at DoJ. Hence the opportunity that The Luntz would take to conflate and confuse.

Versus is not confused, however. Versus knows the difference between what John Yoo et. al. did while at the DoJ and what the unnamed lawyers did in representing their clients before joining DoJ.

John Yoo was supposed to represent the American (including D.A.) people while he worked at DoJ. (Versus, being an angel, has no nationality.) Instead, Yoo+ must have thought they only represented the Administration when they found a supposed legal rationale for the President to allow his subordinates to torture people. That might have zealously represented the President's interests, but he's not the President's lawyer. Yoo+ is OUR lawyer. A vast majority of Americans would not want their lawyer to find an excuse to allow some Americans to claim legal protection to torture other human beings. Hence, John Yoo and others gave bad advice and failed to zealously represent the American people. He did not do his job.

These unnamed lawyers may or may not have zealously represented their terror-suspect clients' interests. Versus and D.A. can't say. If they did so, they did their jobs and should never be subject to penalties for having done so. If, however, they did not zealously represent the terror-suspects' interests -- as all lawyers have sworn an oath to do -- then they didn't do their job. But Liz is trying to penalize or humiliate them for doing their job, so I'm going to guess that they did zealously represent terror-suspects -- as any lawyer worth hiring should do.

The Luntz might take this opportunity to conflate doing one's job and not doing one's job as the same but, of course, it isn't.

Versus, therefore, penalizes all Liz-attacker / Yoo-defender mouthpieces 100 honor points for false conflation. In real terms, that translates to a nice, long extra wait in line for their final judgment.