Matthew Yglesias

The good news comes from the standpoint of American democracy. George W. didn’t, as many liberals feared, steal it. The Supreme Court didn’t hand it to him, a much-rumored effort to intimidate minority voters doesn’t seem to have panned out, and, indeed, participation reached a higher point than we’ve seen in recent memory. A president […]

Saturday’s New York Daily News reported that Republican operatives regarded Friday’s tape from Osama bin Laden as “a gift” because “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps [George W.] Bush.” This is what’s known in the business as a “Kinsley gaffe,” when a political figure makes a mistake by inadvertently telling the […]

After a depressingly long spell in which the presidential campaign was dominated by trivia — who said what about whose lesbian daughter when, and so forth — the Bush team has done us all a favor by releasing an ad that refocuses things on a serious topic. If John Kerry becomes president, you see, you’re […]

Sherlock Holmes lived in England. Except that he didn’t. He’s not real, you see, so he didn’t really live anywhere. Except that, in a sense, he did. This is the phenomenon that philosophers call “truth in fiction.” The point is that an author gets to create his or her own reality in which people who […]

In Coral Gables, Florida, during his closing statement of the first presidential debate, George W. Bush uttered the apparent non sequitur that, if he is re-elected, “the military will be an all-volunteer army.” During the second debate, he got an actual question about the subject and replied: “I hear there’s rumors on the Internets [sic] […]

That George W. Bush lost last Thursday’s debate is beyond doubt. And, clearly, Kerry’s performance was competent and basically free of major mistakes. The risk, however, is that John Kerry believes he won decisively, and will plunge overconfidently into tonight’s face-off without recognizing the need for significant improvements. Which is not to say Kerry had […]

In retrospect, the crazy thing about Dick Cheney is that back in the day we were supposed to be reassured by his presence on the Bush team. George Will, for example, was something of a Bush skeptic in the early days — the candidate seemed dumb and lacked qualifications for high office — but was […]

For reasons of, frankly, rank cynicism most of what I wrote last Thursday and Friday about the presidential debate focused on George W. Bush’s egregious loss on style points. The press, as we learned from the Bush-Gore debates, is composed of very smart people acting very stupid, so this is what they focus on. And […]

While the official party line out of the White House — and parroted by most of the right’s pundits — continues to be that everything’s fine in Iraq (also: in Baghdad, the grass is blue and the sky is purple), your more intelligent conservative writers have shifted to a more, shall we say, nuanced view. […]

Reacting to John Kerry’s speech (his most impressive yet) on national security, delivered September 20 in New York, George W. Bush had little to offer beyond boilerplate rhetoric and familiar distortions of the nature of the Iraqi threat and Kerry’s voting record. On Tuesday, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, he came up with […]