Eugene Robinson's Blog, page 117

Robinson: The GOP’s growing divide

The Republican Party, which should have the wind at its back, enters 2014 in disarray bordering on open warfare.

President Obama and the Democrats have had, let’s face it, a bumpy few months. The debut of the Affordable Care Act was not quite the hair-pulling, garment-rending, world-historical disaster that some critics claim, but it was — and remains — messy enough to buff the shine on the GOP’s badly tarnished brand.

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Robinson: Edward Snowden was the person of the year

There are really just two possible choices for person of the year. I want to say Pope Francis, but I’ve got to go with Edward Snowden.

The spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics and a whistleblowing fugitive from American justice have just one thing in common: impact. Francis, by shifting his church’s focus to social justice, may change the world. But Snowden, by revealing the vast extent of government surveillance, already has.

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Robinson: The right call on the NSA

Blue-ribbon panels are often toothless and useless. But the eminences appointed by President Obama to review the out-of-control National Security Agency (NSA) have produced a surprisingly tough report filled with good recommendations — steps that a president who speaks so eloquently of civil liberties should have taken long ago.

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Robinson: Demand your privacy

It seems our elected officials have no intention of reining in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mad-scientist quest to know everything about our communications and movements. If we want our privacy back, we’re going to have to fight for it.

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Robinson: The GOP mainstream strikes back

The unusual display of reasonable behavior by House Republicans this week should be seen as a retreat — a change in tactics — but not a surrender. Democrats had better note the distinction.

Sooner or later, it had to dawn on the GOP that repeatedly reenacting Pickett’s Charge was not advancing the party’s agenda or enhancing its electoral prospects. In martial terms, President Obama and the Democrats held the high ground; they were the ones visibly making an effort to govern while Republicans did nothing but throw themselves into battles they were sure to lose.

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Robinson: Democrats can win on raising minimum wage

Now that President Obama has outlined the crisis in economic mobility, he should begin by pressing his demand that Congress raise the minimum wage — and not by a little but by a lot.

Obama’s speech Wednesday about the need to redress growing inequality was sweeping and comprehensive — perhaps to a fault. In outlining solutions, he talked about the minimum wage. But he also mentioned immigration reform, rewriting the corporate tax code, eliminating the “sequester” budget cuts, holding down tuition costs for higher education, providing universal preschool, retraining the long-term unemployed, creating “promise zones” in poor communities . . . the list goes on.

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Robinson: Nelson Mandela, the conscience of the world

His smile was like sunshine, but Nelson Mandela was made of steel. It was his strength of character, repeatedly tested throughout his long and impossibly full life, that made him one of the towering political figures of our time.

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Robinson: President Obama’s immoral drone war

U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries may be militarily effective, but they are killing innocent civilians in a way that is obscene and immoral. I’m afraid that ignoring this ugly fact makes Americans complicit in murder.

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Robinson: A pope’s pointed message

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

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Robinson: Iran deal is a diplomatic success story

The U.S.-led deal to freeze Iran’s nuclear program is a great accomplishment on many levels. Begin with the most basic: What if the talks in Geneva had failed?

If Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had gone home empty-handed, we would likely be drifting toward war. Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges would continue whirling until it became unambiguously clear that the nation, if it chose, could make a “breakout” dash to build a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks — something President Obama has said he will not allow.

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