Dylan Matthews

By Dylan Matthews First off, thanks to Ezra for having me over again. It’s always a treat hanging out with you guys. So former ambassador to Venezuela/Assistant Secretary of State/chief Bush administration filibuster Otto Reich isn’t pleased about Obama’s Latin America policy. And when writers at The Corner find a foreign policy approach they disagree […]

By Dylan Matthews Being a pinko commie liberal (or something), I generally take a broad view of workers’ right vis-à-vis their employers. And I’m not exactly a big fan of AIPAC. That being said, this is all kinds of absurd (via Ben Smith): Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC foreign policy chief charged with receiving classified […]

By Dylan Matthews Dan Deacon performs on a local NBC morning show. It’s weird: If you have time, check out the interview he did before his performance, where he describes his music as “what really cool 6-year-olds would create”.

By Dylan Matthews Rarely have I been as happy with a column I so thoroughly disagree with as I am with Ruth Marcus’ piece today. Her central thesis – that Obama is somehow governing with a “moderate tilt” and not as an “unreconstructed liberal” – is pretty absurd on its face. We’re barely two months […]

By Dylan Matthews I guess I’m supposed to be outraged that George Galloway met with Hamas leader and former Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh, but I’m having a hard time mustering it. For one thing, it’s George bloody Galloway. He’d have a two-hour sit-down with a cactus if it pissed off Gordon Brown or the State […]

By Dylan Matthews When the GOP appears set to dump its first African-American leader mere weeks into his tenure in favor of a member of an all-white country club, it’s hard for schadenfreude not to turn into genuine pity and concern. Obviously, this was in large part Steele’s own doing, but it’s fairly tragic that […]

By Dylan Matthews Harvard Crimson lore has it that somewhere in the newspaper’s building, you can find the old portrait of Lenin that Jim Cramer used to hang in his office. Cramer, back in the ’70s, was an actual Communist; not “restoring the top marginal rate to 39.6%” Communist, mind you, but “establishing a dictatorship […]

By Dylan Matthews John Sides has a good, long rant at the expense of Matt Bai and his somewhat off-handed condemnation of political science. The whole thing’s worth reading, but this point in particular deserves emphasizing: Political journalism would be improved with a bit more rigor and somewhat higher empirical standards. It needn’t mimic political […]

By Dylan Matthews Ezra has already written about Jonathan Krohn, and his fifteen minutes seem to be about up, but it’s worth highlighting Ta-Nehisi’s comments on the conservative wunderkind: If you’re a conservative and you care about this kid, you don’t give him a public forum. You give him your card, and you take his […]

By Dylan Matthews You know, I’m all for dispelling the notions that suburbia is eco-friendly and that urbanization is necessarily environmentally deleterious. That said, I somehow doubt that taking on beloved children’s book characters is the best way of going about it. Can’t we find pro-Seuss ways of arguing for urbanism? Isn’t there some way […]