Dick Cheney knows what’s going wrong in Iraq: media bias. Asked Thursday night during a conference call with supporters about “some of the things that are happening in Iraq that are really good but just never get through the media,” the Vice President advised of a cure: Fox News. “I end up spending a lot […]
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
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Our Man in Baghdad
Last week we learned that John Negroponte would become America’s new ambassador to Iraq and will be running U.S. policy in the quasi-sovereign state that will exist from July 1 until elections can be held and a permanent constitution ratified. He speaks no Arabic and he has no experience in the Middle East or the […]
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The Full Negroponte
Iraq will once again become a sovereign nation on June 30, 2004, as power is handed over to a yet to be determined group of individuals that will act in the name of the Iraqi people. Still, it’s going to be a mighty funny sort of sovereignty. The country will be patrolled by more than150,000 […]
Posted inFeatures
Freedom Fraud
By the fall of 2003, the main argument by which the Iraq War was sold to the public — that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that it was likely to give to terrorists — was looking pretty threadbare. Tacking with the wind, George W. Bush took advantage of the 20th anniversary of the National […]
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Failure Redefined
The past two weeks’ events have eroded public confidence in the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, and rightly so. Still, the deterioration of the situation threatens to lower the bar for success and lead people to underestimate the full scope of the problems facing American policy. Before the war, the president clearly stated that his […]
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Credibility Gap
Writing in the March 29 issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Alter described Democrats as “over the top” in their constant references to the president’s dishonesty. “Because Bush & Co. were as shocked as anyone at the absence of WMD” in Iraq, he says, “that’s more in the category of grotesque hype than outright lie.” For a […]
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Counter Intelligence
The release of a new book by Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief at the end of Bill Clinton’s administration and the beginning of George W. Bush’s, accompanied by an interview with him on 60 Minutes, threatens to alert the mainstream media to a story that should have been clear for some time now: the Bush administration’s […]
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Rational Security
Eager as ever to Leave No Corpse Unexploited, the right has wasted little time in promoting the idea that last week’s horrifying terrorist attacks in Madrid are a vindication of the Bush administration’s policies. On March 12, Andrew Sullivan declared his hope that, if al-Qaeda or an affiliate is found to be responsible, “the democratic […]
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Flip-Flap
John Kerry is a flip-flopper. I know this because the RNC tells me so. Just take a look at their new “Interactive Game,” Kerry versus Kerry, or listen to the president’s speech last Wednesday alleging that “Senator Kerry’s been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.” The groundwork […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Forward March
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on November 18 that gay and lesbian couples have a right to marriage under the state constitution, the predominant mood among liberals was not jubilation, as one might have expected, but a sense of foreboding that George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the spin doctors of the […]
