The liberal hawks now say the idea of the war wasn’t bad, just its execution. This saves face — and serves a more dangerous function.
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.
Follow @mattyglesias
Posted inArticle
It’s the Nukes, Stupid
Like pretty much everyone else in Washington, I have no idea what charges Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to bring in the Valerie Plame case, nor do I know who he might charge, or what evidence he has. But I sure am eager to find out. I also hope that whatever he does might refocus public […]
Posted inArticle
Abandon The Sunnis?
Thomas Friedman said a curious thing the other day: Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq […]
Posted inArticle
Waste Not, Work Not
On September 13, Tom DeLay declared victory in the war on wasteful spending and, according to The Washington Times, proclaimed that “there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.” That was dumb. Too dumb, even, for DeLay’s friends and colleagues, who’ve managed to strike back with the even dumber theory […]
Posted inArticle
Becoming The Bogeyman
Writing in Wednesday’s Washington Post, Joe Biden warned that unless we get things right in Iraq, “violence might escalate into a full-blown civil war.” It used to be that we had to stay in Iraq in order to avoid a civil war; now it’s a full-blown civil war that our presence is preventing. (A recent […]
Posted inDispatches
Withdrawal Pains
Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council counterterrorism chief whose book criticizing the Bush administration — and the White House’s ferocious counterattack — briefly dominated public debate in summer 2004, doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience. At a lunch in Washington organized by Steve Clemons, director of the New America Foundation’s foreign-policy program, Clarke […]
Posted inArticle
Business As Usual
The recall of Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Mike Brown last week from the disaster on the Gulf Coast to Washington was, perhaps, the perfect Bush administration moment. Faced with growing criticism of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the revelation that the nation’s disaster-management agency is run by a man whose primary […]
Posted inArticle
Castaways And Cuts
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have focused public attention as never before (in my memory) on the twin scandals of George W. Bush’s proclivity for incompetence laced with dishonesty and the persistence of mass poverty in America. The scandals are not unrelated. When on the campaign trail in 2000 Bush proclaimed himself a “compassionate conservative” […]
Posted inArticle
CAFE Society
A funny thing happened on August 24: I was watching an Orwellian view-screen, which runs short news items and advertisements, in an elevator in the Prospect building on L Street NW, and it said that the Bush administration was tightening fuel-efficiency standards for SUVs. I went to my desk, fired up the old Web browser, […]
Posted inArticle
Manpower Meltdown
Cindy Sheehan’s protest outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, raises many questions, but perhaps none so fundamental as the issue of whether anyone can, in good faith, argue to today’s young people that volunteering for a form of military service is a good idea. Judging by the members of the stay-the-course school of thought […]
