Matthew Yglesias

With a clear majority of the electorate saying that the country is headed in the wrong direction, beating the actually existing John Kerry would be very difficult. So George W. Bush has chosen instead to simply invent a different Kerry to run against. In his speeches, Bush denounces some murky candidate who plans to negotiate […]

I used to be one of those people who got really annoyed at the widespread misuse of the word “ironic,” as in the Alanis Morissette song — or in this report from the Center for American Progress into the sorry state of American security that landed on my desk last Thursday morning. They write that […]

The president, as he revealed last week, doesn’t think he can win the war on terrorism. That’s a bit of an off-message remark for a man whose re-election campaign is predicated on the notion that only he can win the war on terrorism. Worse, the statement suggests the president has only a passing familiarity with […]

Tell me that Rudolph Giuliani did a good job on September 11 and you’ll get no argument from me. Say he was, all things considered, a good mayor and, despite my disagreements with him on some matters, you’ll get no argument from me. If we were in the middle of a presidential campaign focused on […]

John Kerry is a flip-flopper. In 2001, for example, he voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, but now he says that federal education spending should be further increased. In 2002, he voted to give the president authority to threaten the use of force in order to get United Nations inspectors back in Iraq, […]

Considering that he’s the sort of man who’s not above pretending to like Cheez Whiz in order to gain a fleeting political advantage, it should come as no surprise to learn that George W. Bush thinks of the Olympics less as a celebration of athleticism than as yet another opportunity for electioneering. Thus, while the […]

I’ve sort of grown to like Bob Dole over the years, mostly because he’s shown himself to be a genuinely funny guy, able to move beyond the sort of faux-earnest self-righteousness of the practicing politician ever since he lost the presidential race. That, combined with his age (81) and the fact that he was missing […]

On August 5, speaking to the UNITY conference of minority journalists, John Kerry said, “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.” It seems […]