Many of his pieces are profiles, often of crooked and disgraced politicians; others are accounts of offbeat conferences or portraits of cities on the skids, such as Detroit and New Orleans.
In 2010, Simon & Schuster published a collection of his pieces entitled Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: and Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.
Labash describes the newsletter as being "about life and politics and culture and fly fishing and God and whatever else comes, not necessarily in that order.
"[7] Labash has profiled scores of people for the Standard, including his friend and colleague Christopher Hitchens,[8] politician James Traficant (whom he called "the most colorful man who ever inhabited Congress"),[9] CNN reporter Anderson Cooper (of whom he has stated "now all journalistic history is divided into two periods: BAC and AAC.
Before Anderson Cooper and After"),[10] filmmaker Michael Moore ("a Ritz-Carlton revolutionary...the entertainment world's Jesse Jackson, a migratory Mau-Mauist showing up at corporations to demand concessions that will ultimately benefit him, leaving companies a choice between throwing him a bone and risking public humiliation"),[11] and celebrity lawyer William Kunstler ("Defender of Stalinists, all-around press hound, and guest star on TV's Law and Order").
[5] He reported that the 1995 National Conference on Political Assassinations was attended by "fine, friendly folk...from lonely burgs in the Rust and Cheese Belts" who "left behind practices and jobs and bughouses and militia recruiting offices to spend a long weekend in a whirlpool of scholarship, muckraking, and paranoia with the ambience of a 30-year chess club reunion gone deeply, seriously awry.
"[6] Also, he wrote about the death of his friend and colleague Andrew Breitbart, whom he memorialized as "a partisan warrior and a guerrilla theater aficionado – half right wing Yippie, half Andy Kaufman.... Breitbart had the brains, the talent, and the animal charisma to get people to set cars on fire for him, or to run off with him to the desert where he might start his own anti-Obama doomsday cult.
"[15] Labash deliberately does not use Facebook or Twitter, and has written lengthy essays attacking both of these popular social media sites.
In his May 2013 article about Twitter, he stated, "I outright despise the inescapable microblogging service, which nudges its users to leave no thought unexpressed, except for the fully formed ones....I hate the way Twitter transforms the written word into abbreviations and hieroglyphics, the staccato bursts of emptiness that occur when Twidiots who have no business writing for public consumption squeeze themselves into 140-character cement shoes.
Now, a scary majority tend to speak more intelligently than they tweet.....I hate that formerly respectable adults now think it's okay to go at each other like spray-tanned girls on Jersey Shore, who start windmill-slapping each other after they've each had double-digit cherry vodkas and one calls the other "fat.
He once stated, "I was sour on the war (in Iraq) when many, many of our neoliberal friends were still something close to cheerleaders....I just never understood what was in it for America to get bogged down there for the better part of a decade.
"[17] Bush, he said in 2004, "has spent the better part of a year and a half painting smiley faces on Iraq, when it is still a festering sore, to put it charitably.
He added: "one could see how Karl Rove... has a point when suggesting that the American people might expect 'a certain level of gravitas' in someone who's considering running for president, and that starring in your own reality show might not be the ticket.
"[17] He expanded on these observations in another interview: "I work in the right-wing world, but we have a good understanding at the magazine that everyone gets to follow their interests and eccentricities.
[22] He contributed to the 2014 anthology The Seven Deadly Virtues: 18 Conservative Writers on Why the Virtuous Life is Funny as Hell, edited by Jonathan V. Last, which was described by the publisher as "a hilarious, insightful, sanctimony-free remix of William Bennett's The Book of Virtues—without parental controls."
"[6] In 2010, a collection of Labash essays from the Standard, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: and Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys, was published by Simon & Schuster.
Richard B. Cheney to former Ohio Rep. James Traficant, and American cities such as Detroit, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana, to personal opinion-related pieces on such issues as US-Canada relations, physical education, and Facebook.
"Labash takes readers to the fringes in his portraits of people and places outside the mainstream and, very often, beyond our ken," wrote Publishers Weekly.
"His subjects are outlandish and unforgettable....His profiles of disgraced former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, corrupt former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, Rev.
Al Sharpton, and Vice President Dick Cheney stand out for their affecting portrayals of the humanity behind the larger-than-life personas.
You can hear the hiss as the air goes out of Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, and Roger Stone.
"[27] "In a just world," wrote Mark Lasswell in a review of the book for The Wall Street Journal, "Matt Labash would be celebrated as the heir to Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and other writers in the 1960s and 1970s who were corralled under the rubric of 'new journalism'.....Like the best of the new-journalism practitioners, Mr. Labash inhabits a story so thoroughly that readers feel as if they're at his side, seeing events with his sharp eye, privy to his wisecracks, savoring moments when he reels in what feels like the truth."
"The Weekly Standard senior writer intercuts biting analysis of America's declining fortunes with juicy, hilarious portraits of its damaged politicians, and somehow manages to humanize even the most inhuman among us....Unlike his first-person-possessed New Journalism forebears, Labash subordinates his own tough-guy persona in favor of the absurdities in his notes.
At heart, he's a highly skilled reporter who prefers a powerful quotation to a self-absorbed reference – realizing, correctly, that a writer can convey a point of view without turning the spotlight on the process but, rather, on its rewards.
By targeting his sensibilities on the fringe figures of American politics, Labash performs a valuable public service even as he establishes himself as one of the top writers of his generation.
Included in the exposé were accounts from call girls, substantiated by credit card receipts, purportedly indicating that Chopra had paid for their services.
In a court brief, one of Chopra's lawyers, William Bradford Reynolds, a Reagan administration Justice Department official, described Labash as a "brash young 25-year-old cub reporter."
Libel experts said the information revealed in court records indicated that it would be difficult to prove the Standard had acted with "actual malice" but that juries were unpredictable.
'"[33] He has facetiously stated: "I don't talk to Real People often if I can help it, as they tend to confuse the emerging media narrative with their common sense, consistency, and almost touching naïveté.
"[6] "Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard is consistently one of the best magazine writers in the country," David Brooks, editorial columnist for The New York Times wrote in his December 25, 2007 column.