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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.

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TNR on Libby

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 3 2007, 10:28 AM ET Comment

I'm reliably informed that New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz has, paradoxically, no influence over the work that The New Republic's staff publishes in The New Republic. Thus, I strolled over to The Plank fully expecting to see some full-throated commentary on the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, Peretz' participation in the Scooter Libby defense fund notwithstanding.

Nor was I disappointed. Yesterday, Alex Massie offered the view that "Regardless of whether or not one thinks it wrong (or proper!) that Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, it seems politically smart to me." Noam Scheiber took a different view, arguing that "commuting the sentence strikes me as the worst of both worlds." A fascinating discussion! Did the president spare a wrongfully convicted, wrongfully prosecuted man from hard time he didn't deserve? Did the president abuse his pardon power to help further the obstruction of justice? Nobody cares!

UPDATE: I had forgotten that David Greenberg wrote two articles (one; two) defending Libby back in March, one on the website and one in the print magazine.

UPDATE II: Here's the kind of thing I was hoping to see.

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