Eugene Robinson's Blog, page 123

Paula Deen’s slurs are a bitter pill to swallow

Paula Deen needs to give the self-pity a rest. The damage to her carefully built image is self-inflicted — nobody threw a rock — and her desperate search for approval and vindication is just making things worse.

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Supreme Court caution on affirmative action

The Supreme Court decision on affirmative action could have been a lot worse. Given the court’s ideological tilt, in fact, it was probably the best we could have hoped for.

This is a “dog that didn’t bark” kind of story: In a 7 to 1 ruling, the justices ordered a lower court to reconsider its decision upholding the University of Texas’s admissions policy. A tougher standard must be applied, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, in evaluating the school’s practice of using the applicant’s race as one of several criteria.

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Congress should hang up the NSA phone tracking

From the evidence so far, there’s no good reason to let the National Security Agency (NSA) continue its massively intrusive practice of logging our private phone calls. Congress should pull the plug.

I’m not ignoring all the officials, including President Obama, who swear that the electronic snooping has foiled dozens of terrorist plots and saved untold lives. I’m just listening carefully, and what we’re getting is a lot of doublespeak and precious little clarity.

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Giving arms to Syrian rebels is a bad idea

In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible “moderates” whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.

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On DNA, Scalia was right

The Supreme Court’s ruling last week, allowing police to compel DNA samples from persons arrested for serious offenses, will solve cold cases around the country and put dangerous criminals behind bars. But despite this clearly beneficial impact, the court’s 5 to 4 ruling was wrong — and may be more far-reaching than we can now imagine.

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Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks show we need a debate

The important thing right now isn’t whether Edward Snowden should be labeled a hero or villain. First, let’s have the debate he sparked over surveillance and privacy. Then we can decide how history should remember him.

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Does Verizon records case mean an end to privacy?

Someday, a young girl will look up into her father’s eyes and ask, “Daddy, what was privacy?”

The father probably won’t recall. I fear we’ve already forgotten that there was a time when a U.S. citizen’s telephone calls were nobody else’s business. A time when people would have been shocked and angered to learn that the government was compiling a detailed log of ostensibly private calls made and received by millions of Americans.

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Give Manning a plea deal in classified leaks case

The treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been excessively harsh, as far as I can tell. If he is found guilty of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, he deserves some punishment — probably — but should not be at risk of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Apparently.

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The GOP is too juvenile to govern

With budgetary tantrums in the Senate and investigative play-acting in the House, the Republican Party is proving once again that it simply cannot be taken seriously.

This is a shame. I don’t share the GOP’s philosophy, but I do believe that competition makes both of our major parties smarter. I also believe that a big, complicated country facing economic and geopolitical challenges needs a government able to govern.

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The end of the ‘war on terror’

President Obama wisely avoided the phrase “mission accomplished” in his major speech last week about the “war on terror,” but columnists aren’t obliged to be so circumspect: It is time to declare victory and get on with our lives.

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