Matthew Yglesias

FIRST THINGS FIRST. Greg asks a good question below about the politics of Iran, and I don’t have a super-good answer. I would say that the beginning of political wisdom on this topic, however, is a little dose of the old moral clarity. There are two different questions Democratic officeholders can be asking themselves, their […]

THE IDEOLOGY’S THE THING. I’m not so high on this “Bush wants to bomb Iran to secure his legacy” concept. As we enter into the twighlight years of Bushism, it’s important to avoid ascribing problematic elements of the past five years of American governance to Bush’s personal idiosyncrasies when, in fact, the real source of […]

IRAN REALITY. One thing that makes the Iran issue difficult is that one side is led by a religious fanatic suffering delusions of grandeur with a taste for demagogic posturing and the other country has, well, about the same. Thus, it seems that American and Iranian officials alike are exaggerating the successes of the Iranian […]

ABOUT THAT SCLEROSIS. The economic performance of the large continental European economies — France, Italy, and Germany — really does leave a great deal to be desired. That said, the American press seems dogmatically determined to vastly overstate the extent of the problems. This editorial in my morning paper argues that “European governments seem unable […]

BOOING CHENEY. This is bizarre. Dick Cheney was selected to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener yesterday and got booed as he took the mound because he’s ridiculously unpopular. This, as Jane Hamsher notes, was reported by The Washington Post thusly: The first pitch of the Washington Nationals� second season […]

ITALY’S STABLE INSTABILITY. Earlier today, Ezra linked to an article suggesting that Italy’s history of unstable governments is a contributor to the difficulty of introducing economic reforms. A National Review editorial makes a similar claim: Prodi’s coalition is a gamut of nine parties � running from two Communist parties at one extreme to liberals and […]

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ‘EM. One idea I’ve seen kicking around the past couple of days is that talk of military strikes against Iran may be part of some kind of clever gamesmanship designed to achieve a diplomatic resolution. I think people need to think harder about that. Airstrikes would, at best, delay Iranian acquisition […]

A SQUEAKER IN ITALY. It looks like Romani Prodi‘s center-left coalition will eke out a very narrow victory against hilarious crook-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi. If so, Italian society may soon prove less divided than it seems. Even the narrowest of margins for Prodi’s coalition would allow him to remedy the current situation where some television stations […]

MEANWHILE IN CRAZY LAND. I have no idea what the provenance of the documents Bill Kristol is quoting here is exactly supposed to be, but they definitely don’t show what he seems to think they show. What’s going on here, plainly, is that Saddam Hussein was making plans for irregular warfare, possibly including terrorism, as […]