Laid up sick last week, I had as my company Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, by Bruce Bartlett, destined to become every liberal’s favorite conservative book of 2006, if not the entire Bush years. The book is a stirring indictment of the White House’s economic policy, focused on […]
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias is a senior editor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a former Prospect staff writer, and the author of Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.
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Posted inDispatches
Persian Cat-astrophe
The atmosphere on the morning of Monday, January 23, was more of a bad dream than a press conference. I was in a small room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol; sitting directly behind me amid the rows of cheap folding chairs was a young man from the National Union for Democracy in Iran, […]
Posted inArticle
Misplaced Priorities
The spending priorities outlined in the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review and the president’s budget proposal indicate that the Bush administration seems to have trouble reading their calendars. Vast sums of money are scheduled to be spent on maintaining America’s entire giant arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. Vaster sums will go to the development of […]
Posted inArticle
A Sensible Plan for Iran
It occurs to me to mention that Atrios and Amy Sullivan can both be right about the subject of their disagreement on Iran. As Amy says, Iran probably is the biggest threat America faces today, at least in standard national-security terms. At the same time, as Atrios says, Iran’s not really especially threatening in the […]
Posted inArticle
The Demerits of Meritocracy
Compared to most of my Prospect colleagues, I’m soft on globalization. In fact, I’m the sort of guy who’s prone to observe that bad as wages and working conditions may be in a Chinese factory, they must be better than the alternative or else nobody would take the jobs and that most of the problems […]
Posted inArticle
Iran, Contra
On Saturday afternoon I found, among other things, an Andrew Sullivan post illustrating the contours of the Iran debate. “Here’s Simon Jenkins, in a case for what can only be called appeasement,” he wrote. “Appeasement,” of course, is a dirty word in the contemporary West. After all, we all know Neville Chamberlain tried that at […]
Posted inArticle
An Iranian Misadventure
What to do about Iran is a genuinely difficult question. Neoconservatives tend to overstate the threat posed by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, but the truth is bad enough. Sanctions seem unlikely to deter the Tehran regime, currently cushioned by sky-high oil revenues. Air strikes seem likely to produce deeply problematic political and military […]
Posted inFeatures
Just What Is the Working Class?
The white working class, referred to as “America’s forgotten majority” in a 2000 book of that title by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rodgers, has been anything but forgotten since the 2004 election. Disputes within the liberal family have focused obsessively on how Democrats can regain the allegiance of this demographic, considered to be a necessary […]
Posted inArticle
Abramoff’s Wake
The hip thing to do this week is to encourage people to adopt lobbying-reform legislation. Conservative writers say the GOP should minimize the damage done by the Jack Abramoff scandal and other sleaze clinging to the congressional party. Liberals writers say the Democrats should lead the charge in order to maximize Republican pain. Other editorialists […]
Posted inArticle
Democratic Conviction
It was the year of the dogs that didn’t bark. A newly dominant Republican Party was supposed to use its position to simultaneously transform American public policy and render the Democrats a permanently irrelevant minority party, isolated in a few coastal enclaves. It didn’t happen. And, in fact, it started to unravel almost right away. […]
