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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.

Clinton A Wee Bit Silly

By Matthew Yglesias
Mar 7 2008, 7:31 PM ET Comment

One of the strangest elements of this campaign has been that Hillary Clinton has put special emphasis on the idea that she's the candidate of experience with regard to foreign policy matters, even though most accounts of the Clinton administration seem to indicate that this was the part of her husband's administration she was least involved with. The one concrete example of involvement in foreign policymaking she's really given relates to the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, but she seems to be lying about this:

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.


George Mitchell, too, has tended to contradict Clinton's claims on this score.

UPDATE: Chicago Tribune takes a broader look at Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience and finds it to be mostly flim-flam. It's not just that it's false, in general, that she has a lot of experience in this field, but her campaign actually puts out specific examples of things she did while First Lady that, upon examination, turn out not to hold up.

Josh Marshall says "she doesn't need to be a seasoned foreign policy hand. But she's setting herself up for a fall when she claims to be." Right. Clinton would, like Barack Obama, and most modern presidents (Ike, Nixon, and GHWB being the big counterexamples) have little experience with running foreign policy. But she feels compelled to lie about it.

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