Friday’s three big news stories–the elections in Iraq, the president’s flip-flop on John McCain’s anti-torture amendment, and the revelation that the administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants–brought home in an unusually poignant manner one of the paradoxes at the heart of the past several years: The same group of […]
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
Mind the Gap
It takes a unique sort of administration to decide that the reason its almost three-year-old war shows no signs of concluding successfully is that the president hasn’t given enough speeches yet. But on the morning of November 30, the commander-in-chief was trotted out to do just that before an audience of midshipmen at the U.S. […]
Posted inArticle
Message Management
Having argued with tedious frequency for the proposition that the United States needs to look for ways to head for the exit doors in Iraq, I’m naturally heartened, in some ways, by a recent uptick in anti-war sentiment among the Democratic Party’s leaders. Nevertheless, advocacy of withdrawal within the liberal community has long been bedeviled […]
Posted inArticle
Let’s Talk Football
It’s not often that I have occasion to praise House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.), but his plan to hold hearings Wednesday on college football’s Bowl Championship Series is a good one. There’s a reason, after all, that every other major sports championship on Earth is resolved through a playoff rather than by […]
Posted inFeatures
Big-Time Trouble
As far as we know, Vegas isn’t taking odds yet on whether Dick Cheney will remain vice president until noon on January 20, 2009. But Cheney is increasingly under siege from a variety of separate but interrelated lines of inquiry, and of all the hot seats in the administration right now, “Big Time’s” is arguably […]
Posted inArticle
The Revision Thing
Grant President Bush one thing: There is a whiff of hypocrisy about Democratic senators and representatives who favored the Iraq War complaining that the president distorted intelligence findings to sell the war to the public. That the biggest and most important of Bush’s deceptions — that Saddam Hussein was likely to give a nuclear bomb […]
Posted inArticle
Return Of The Tinker
In a more just world, Ahmed Chalabi would spend the rest of his life afraid to set foot in the United States. After all, what could possibly await him in Uncle Sam’s jurisdiction but a bundle of awkward subpoenas and summonses? The man in question stands accused of passing classified information from the U.S. government […]
Posted inArticle
Lying Matters
On July 14, 2003, syndicated columnist Robert Novak published “Mission to Niger,” which reported, among other things, that former Ambassador Joseph “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” The information was sourced to “senior administration officials.” That left a lot of questions […]
Posted inArticle
Comparing Extremists
Democrats, you could argue, lose elections because they’re in thrall to the extremist views of their base, especially on social issues. Take abortion: Many Democrats think that, if a pregnant teenager is considering an abortion, that should be up to her rather than to her parents. This is unpopular in some segments of the electorate. […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
How They Did It
Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (Yale University Press, 272 pages, $25.00) Most observers expected at the beginning of 2001 that George W. Bush would pursue a moderate course in office. Some thought he would do so because they’d been duped by […]
