Inside Information
Paul O’Neill has come out and raised the tent flap on the Bush administration a little, showing everyone some of the inside workings that a lot of us assumed was true but had not had direct confirmation. O’Neill, the Bush administration’s Treasury Secretary for the first two years, is featured in a book (with 19,000 pages of documentation on a CD-ROM) about his time in the Bush realm, entitled The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill, written by Pulitzer-winner Ron Suskind.
Time Magazine has an article out on the book, and just that is fairly revealing:
O’Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it. But others in the White House saw a chance to capitalize on the historic Republican congressional gains in the 2002 elections. Surely, Cheney would not be so smug. He would hear O’Neill out. In an economic meeting in the Vice President’s office, O’Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. O’Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms. This is our due.”
Cheney is described as “an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts as he drives Administration policy toward his goals,” pretty much the image held of Cheney as the real power in the White House, though controlling it from his “undisclosed” hideout.
Bush is described as opaque, with even his top officials not knowing what he was thinking, having to guess at what policy initiatives he favored, even having to float ideas to the media in order to get Bush to indicate how he felt–usually resulting in embarrassing contradictions. O’Neill describes Bush as being “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.”
He also notes that there never was evidence of WMD, having been a member of the National Security Council during his tenure; rather, Hussein and Iraq were targets of the Bush people from very early on. The conclusion we can draw is that all the WMD talk (again, as many of us have suspected) and 9/11 were simply pretexts engineered for the benefit of a public otherwise unwilling to go to war.
Looks to be a very interesting read, and may have some implications in the upcoming election year.
I was listening to NPR today — they said it was unlikely to hurt Bush in the election, and I thought to myself how insane it would be if it didn’t. I mean, consider how many people outright despise Clinton, and for what exactly? Cheating on his wife? Trying to cover his ass over it?
Bush’s crimes are so serious it boggles the mind. Sometimes I wonder how he can sleep at night, considering how many people have died at his command — but then I realize he thinks it’s all fine, that god anointed him president for a holy mission to “protect” America and it’s all justified. *shivers* And perhaps that is even scarier.
I wrote on my blog recently about how those people who still (foolishly) believe that a.) Iraq had something to do with 9-11, b.) the war had something to do with 9-11 and/or terrorism or c.) believed the standard WMD line need to wake up and take notice of Paul O’Neill’s story.
I tend to take a dim view of today’s state of affairs. I think we’re on a path that will lead us to things few Americans have ever imagined could happen in this country.