If You Are Very Old

Or if you read history, you might be familiar with a time long ago when Presidents would fire insubordinate assholes who deliberately undercut their administration's policies, no matter how popular that asshole may be, or how much outrage that firing may ignite.

As Brother Charles Pierce points out, John Brennan is one such insubordinate asshole who needs publicly sacked by Barack Obama and walked out of the building by security immediately.

No Vegas odds-makers has yet crunched the numbers on the probability of this actually happening, but I'm guessing it's somewhere around the same as The Ghost of Reagan Past from the grave on Christmas Eve to remind a joint session of congress that he not only...

...fought for the passage of the U.N. Convention on Torture and made the U.S. a signatory to it in 1984. And not only did he push for each country to prosecute anyone in their leadership that engages in torture, he specifically called for the use of universal jurisdiction to prosecute leaders in other countries who do so. Here’s what he said when he signed the treaty:

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today. 

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”