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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

Strange Decorum

By Matthew Yglesias
Feb 19 2007, 12:07 PM ET Comment

Everyone is quoting this example of Bush getting naughty:

Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"


To try and make a novel point about this, why wouldn't Bush say he wants to "fuck" OBL in the ass? It strikes me as strange to get fastidious about the terminology used to express the rape fantasy as long as you're going to express the fantasy. I had a similar thought yesterday's watching Cradle 2 The Grave (truly the poor man's Romeo Must Die) on TNT where it was okay to show giant gun battles, a woman performing a striptease to distract a guy while her colleagues break into his office, etc., but everyone had to say "freak" instead of "fuck." What does this accomplish? Meanwhile, there were an awful lot of ads for K-Y Jelly running during commercial breaks which seem much more likely to me to generate a situation that will make parents uncomfortable ("daddy, what's a lubricant for?") than would the occassional dirty word.

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