Matthew Yglesias

“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” President George W. Bush told The Washington Post in an interview published Sunday morning. “The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me.” Thus is dismissed any notion […]

Last week, Peter H. Wehner — Karl Rove’s deputy inside the White House — shared with us, in a leaked memo, his view that “no one on this planet can tell you why a 25-year-old person today is entitled to a 40 percent increase in Social Security benefits (in real terms) compared to what a […]

“There’s one group of people who get bullied all the time, and that’s Christians,” Pastor Patrick Wooden told the Los Angeles Times on December 17. “I know what it is like to be bullied. It is apartheid in reverse — the majority is being bullied by the minority.” The proximate cause of his complaint is […]

I picked up an interesting rumor the other day out on the Internets from Berkeley economist Brad DeLong. As you may have heard, the Bush administration would like to eliminate or sharply curtail Social Security’s guaranteed benefit program and transform it into a program of forced savings. Instead of paying a certain amount of your […]

Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution, served as an Iran-Iraq military analyst at the CIA from 1988-95. He was also director for Near East and South Asian Affairs, and director for Persian Gulf Affairs ,at the National Security Council during the late 1990s. He wrote the influential book The […]

The still-ongoing events in Ukraine are important in their own right, but salutary as well for other reasons. I, for one, find it comforting to have proper good guys and bad guys again. The international disputes of the past few years — pitting George W. Bush against, variously, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Abu Musab […]

For months now, skeptics of George W. Bush’s Iraq policy have been warning that the present path could lead to bloody civil war. More recently, proponents of a continued U.S. military presence have been warning that bloody civil war would be the result of a withdrawal. Both sides can, perhaps, stop warning — the civil […]

After an initial post-election obsession with the phenomenon of “values” voters, more liberals seem open to the idea that improving the Democratic Party’s image on national security could prove a more fruitful vein for electoral success. This, I think, is right. The share of the electorate telling exit pollsters that moral values drove their vote […]

Less than a week after the election, the word has come down from Liberal Media High Command that the left needs to stop having a condescending attitude toward the faith-based white folk living out in the vast exurban and rural hinterland that, along with the White House, the Congress, and the federal judiciary, is the […]