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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.

Purple Toupee

By Matthew Yglesias
May 7 2008, 2:41 PM ET Comment

I'm no longer convinced that John McCain should make a one term pledge. After all, as commenters to the previous post argued there are other ways to make TMBG relevant to the McCain campaign. Consider, for example, "Purple Toupee" which I think he should use as a theme song.



First, McCain's desire to see heightened China-Taiwan tensions in order to prompt a new Cold War and inflate his own sense of self-importance:

Chinese people were fighting in the park
We tried to help them fight, no one appreciated that
Martin X was mad when they outlawed bell bottoms
Ten years later they were sharing the same cell
I shouted out, "Free the Expo '67"
Till they stepped on my hair, and they told me I was fat
Now I'm very big, I'm a big important man
And the only thing that's different is underneath my hat


And more broadly, a an anachronistic authoritarian streak:

Purple toupee is here to stay after the hair has gone away
The purple brigade is marching from the grave

We're on some kind of mission
We have an obligation
We have to wear toupees


Don't say you weren't warned.

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