WASHINGTON — No force on Earth can stop Sarah Palin from becoming our very own “lite” version of Eva Peron — a glamorous and tragic legend, minus the tragedy. Eventually, some clever composer will write a blockbuster musical about her life and times. Stage directions will include: “SARAH fires gun. MOOSE dies.”
It’s futile to try to ignore Palin, however noble the effort may be.
WASHINGTON — The most dreadful burden of the presidency — the power to send men and women to die for their country — seems to weigh heavily on Barack Obama these days. He went to Dover Air Force Base to salute the coffins of fallen troops. He gave a moving speech at the memorial service for victims of last week’s killings at Fort Hood. On Veterans Day, after the traditional wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery, he took an unscheduled walk among the rows of marble headstones in Section 60, where the dead from our two ongoing wars are buried.
As he decides whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan, Obama should keep these images in mind. Geopolitical calculation has human consequences.
WASHINGTON — There’s a difference between sensitivity and stupidity.
If there were indeed signs that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood mass murderer, was becoming radicalized in his opposition to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army had a duty to act — before he did.
Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said Sunday he was concerned that “this increased speculation” about Hasan’s evolving political and religious views “could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” Casey is right to worry about the lunatics and bigots who now will think of all Muslims in the military as potential enemies. But it only feeds such paranoia to ignore alarm bells that an unstable individual, Muslim or not, is about to blow.
WASHINGTON — It’s been a year since a healthy majority of American voters elected Barack Obama to change the world. Which is precisely what he’s doing.
Like many people who desperately want to see the country take a more progressive course, I quibble and quarrel with some of President Obama’s actions. I wish he’d been tougher on Wall Street, quicker to close Guantanamo, more willing to investigate Bush-era excesses, bolder in seeking truly universal health care. I wish he could summon more of the rhetorical magic that spoke so compellingly to the better angels of our nature.
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama didn’t set out to be a “war president,” but that’s what history compels him to be. The nation and the world are fortunate that he doesn’t have the reckless, ready-fire-aim mentality of George W. Bush. But Afghanistan doesn’t present the kind of “false choices” that Obama, by nature, habitually rejects. The choices are real and awful, and no amount of reframing and rephrasing will make them go away.
Monday’s tragic events — 14 U.S. troops killed in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan — remind us of the decisions Obama faces. At least he seems to recognize that he can’t just let the situation drift.
WASHINGTON — Now we know the answer to one of the vexing questions of the modern age: Evidently, there is nothing at all that some people won’t do to get on television.
As proof: balloon boy.
WASHINGTON — Somebody explain this to me: The president of the United States wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and Rush Limbaugh joins with the Taliban in bitterly denouncing the award? Glenn Beck has a conniption fit and demands that the president not accept what may be the world’s most prestigious honor? The Republican National Committee issues a statement sarcastically mocking our nation’s leader — elected, you will recall, by a healthy majority — as unworthy of such recognition?
Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?
WASHINGTON — House Democrats had better start taking the ethics allegations against Rep. Charlie Rangel seriously. I know it’s difficult for those steeped in Capitol Hill’s hermetic culture to understand, but a verdict of “mistakes were made” — which a lot of Democrats would like to reach — doesn’t cut it in the real world. Strange as it seems. Seriously.
Republicans, I should note, are being baldly hypocritical in calling for Rangel, who has spent four decades in the House, to step down immediately as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — a position that makes him one of the most powerful men in Washington. Those same Republicans were happy to keep “Dancing with the Stars” dropout Tom DeLay as majority leader for years while he was under a monsoon’s worth of ethical cloud cover.
But just because Republicans are posturing for political gain doesn’t mean that Democrats can do the same without paying a price. If you win big majorities in both the House and Senate by railing against a “culture of corruption” in Washington, as the Democratic Party did, voters tend to get the wacky notion that you actually mean what you say.
The violations that Rangel is alleged to have committed are, inconveniently for him, easy for anyone to understand. The most serious, perhaps, is the allegation that he failed to pay taxes on about $75,000 in income from renting out a beach house that he owns in the Dominican Republic. For the chairman of the House committee that writes tax legislation not to pay his fair share in taxes would be as bad as, say, for the secretary of the Treasury not to pay his fair share in taxes. Hold it, maybe that’s a bad example.
The most stunning alleged violation is more of a technicality: That on required financial disclosure forms, Rangel failed to list more than $500,000 in assets. The average citizen isn’t likely to have half a millions bucks somehow slip his mind, since the average citizen doesn’t have anything near half a million bucks.
And we’re not talking easily overlooked “Antiques Roadshow” assets — a dusty painting in the attic that turns out to be the work of a second-tier Old Master, or a rickety chair in the basement that experts date as 18th century. What Rangel failed to declare were liquid assets — a credit union account worth more than $250,000 and an investment account also worth more than $250,000 — plus some real estate he owns in New Jersey and assorted stock holdings.
These omissions came to light after Rangel filed amended disclosure forms, so he blew the whistle on himself. But he was already under fire for other alleged lapses, including having leased several rent-stabilized New York apartments — one of which he used as a campaign office — at below-market value, even though such apartments are supposed to be used as a tenant’s primary residence. Technically, this could be considered an illegal gift from the landlord to Rangel. This allegation probably fits into the “too convoluted to bother with” category.
And another charge goes into the “too trivial to mention” file — that Rangel used his official stationery to solicit funds for a new educational center to be named after him at City University of New York.
The House ethics committee is looking into the allegations and seems to be taking its sweet time. If we were just talking about the misused letterhead and the rent-controlled apartments, we’d be well within “mistakes were made” territory. The failure to disclose the huge credit union and investment accounts is harder to dismiss, but at least there’s no suggestion that the funds were ill-gotten. The tax issue is flat-out problematic. Not paying taxes is against the law.
The real problem, though, is the overall portrait of a wealthy and privileged congressional pasha to whom ordinary rules don’t apply. It’s a picture that obscures Rangel’s long and tireless work in the House on behalf of the needy and dispossessed. It pains me to see his record tarnished, because I like and admire the guy. But he’s the one who did the tarnishing.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi may owe Rangel her job, but she needs to press the ethics committee to do its work without fear or favor. And she needs to contemplate the prospect of explaining to voters, come next fall, why the affluent man who sets their taxes didn’t pay his.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.
WASHINGTON — How to proceed in Afghanistan will be among the most difficult and fateful decisions that President Obama ever makes. But he’s the one who has to decide, not his generals. The men with the stars on their shoulders — and I say this with enormous respect for their patriotism and service — need to shut up and salute.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is entitled to his opinion about the best way forward. But he has no business conducting a public campaign to build support for his preferred option, which is to send tens of thousands more troops into a country once called the “graveyard of empires.”
WASHINGTON — Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the Puritan scolds definitely have a point.
Even the French government has backed off its defense of the fugitive director. Polanski, who has dual French-Polish citizenship, fled the United States in 1978 before he could be sentenced on a charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. He spent the past three decades mostly in France, and officials in Paris reacted angrily when he was nabbed at the Zurich airport. In more recent statements, however, French leaders have taken a much more measured position, saying that justice should run its course.