Matthew Yglesias

When we last discussed the topic of Iraq’s alleged relationship with al-Qaeda, my main goal was to have a little fun at Stephen Hayes’ expense. The recent release of the 9-11 Commission’s report on the subject, however, has returned the topic to the front burner of the public discourse. The result has been to lead […]

When President Bush put forward his demand for a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, several moderate Republican Senators, including Dick Lugar, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, initially balked. The president, they felt, simply hadn’t laid the groundwork for an effective military campaign. They began working with Senate Democrats on […]

Born a few months after Reagan’s inauguration, I have no personal recollection of the man, and this weekend’s wall-to-wall coverage has been my first sustained exposure to his presidency. The tone of his rhetoric is striking. From his first inaugural address it seems that, initially at least, he took his role as Barry Goldwater’s heir […]

They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps. If so, Stephen Hayes must not want us to take his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, very seriously. At a publicity event for the book held on June 3 at the American Enterprise Institute, […]

Surveying the vast wasteland that George W. Bush has made of American governance, even the most sophisticated observer is driven to ask, like the simple son at a Passover seder, what is all this? The most compelling hypothesis so far is that we have not one president but two. Or, rather, two shadow presidents. Domestic […]

With bad news coming from all sources — security nightmares in Iraq, dissenters in the conservative ranks, and a half-dozen scandals under investigation — George W. Bush seems to be tumbling toward defeat with hardly a push from challenger John Kerry. But is this the best way for Kerry to prepare for November? Prospect writing […]

Remember Howard Dean? Early last December he was riding high. Having been dismissed early in the campaign by even his fans as a hopeless cause, he’d managed to parlay a wave of anti-Bush sentiment and novel Internet organizing into front-runner status for the Democratic nomination. Still, two interconnected questions remained. First, could he beat George […]

After several weeks of panic over the Kerry campaign’s supposed inability to take advantage of the recent bad news for the Bush administration, a new meme has risen to the fore. With a more sophisticated look at the polls, the new thinking goes, we can see that John Kerry’s going to win. Big. The logic, […]

Presumably exhausted after hours of earlier testimony before both the Senate and the House, Don Rumsfeld strayed a bit off-topic late Friday afternoon in response to a question from Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.). Langevin wanted to know, sensibly, “how do we restore our credibility on human rights,” in the wake of revelations of torture and […]