It should not be a surprise that those who need a job sometimes have to say and do things that they may not agree with. We can understand such behavior when it is done by people occupying lowly positions and who have few options. What is more surprising is when people who have perfectly good and secure careers are willing to betray the principles they stood for simply to be close to power.

Harold Koh, former Dean of the Yale law school and now adviser to the State Department, who used to be a strong voice for the rule of law and opposition to the imperial presidency, provides a sad but perfect case study of this phenomenon. He has become this administration’s John Yoo, an academic who is willing to provide the rationale for whatever his boss wants to do. In Yoo’s case the issue was torture. In Koh’s it is the absurd claim by Obama that the US is not engaged in hostilities in Libya as envisaged by the War Powers Act. Like Yoo, Koh could have easily afforded to stand on principle and even enhanced his career and reputation by doing so. But instead he sold his soul.

As Gene Healy says, “It’s the kind of story you hear again and again in D.C. — on the right and the left — of principles sold out for the dubious rewards of “access” and “relevance.” This town is “Hollywood for the Ugly” in more ways than one.”

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

[I]t’s easy to see how Koh has risen from token liberal placed in an inconsequential “advisory” position at State to the face of the Obama administration and prime Presidential spokesman. As Barack Obama himself has repeatedly shown, and as his underling Koh has dutifully learned, one does not advance in Washington power circles by adherence to any sort of principle or actual conviction. One accumulates power by saying anything and everything necessary to acquire and hold onto it: one key reason I now all but disregard what Obama says, and watch only what he does.

As far back as in 1946, George Orwell described in his classic essay Politics and the English Language how politicians deliberately corrupt language so that certain political terms no longer have any core meaning but become infinitely malleable, designed to fit whatever need the politician has in mind.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
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