I stumbled
across this news items yesterday on the Newsday website looking for something
else. It mentions that O‘Neill will be interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday
evening and casts a slightly different angle to the ‘retaliatory’ book:
“Never reluctant to
speak his mind, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has aimed a few
well-chosen words at President George W. Bush, describing his old boss at
cabinet meetings as a "blind man in a room full of deaf people."
…White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan dismissed O'Neill's
portrayal. "I think it's well known the way the president approaches
governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that
leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what
he'll continue to do," he said.
O'Neill, picked for the Treasury job on the advice of Vice President Dick
Cheney, returned to Pittsburgh after he was fired and now directs a regional
health care network and works for the Blackstone Group, an investment firm. His criticism of the Bush
administration is included in "The Price of Loyalty," a book by
former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, for whom O'Neill was the
primary source.
In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette Friday, O'Neill said he hoped
to raise the level of political and economic debate. "If the 'red meat' taken out of context
is all that people get out of this book, it will be a huge disappointment to me," he
said. "Ideally, this book will cause people to stop
and think about the current state of our political process and raise our
expectations for what is possible."
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-usoneil0110,0,5931679.story?coll=ny-nationworld-headlines
There was an intriguing item on BBC Radio 4 this morning
concerning
ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's adverse comments on G.W. Bush. These
arose from a TV interview in the US and perhaps an FWer might be able to
source this more accurately and flesh it out. O'Neill is no doubt piqued by
being sacked by Bush so peremptorily three or four months ago but,
nevertheless, what he says about Bush conforms exactly with what I've
picked up from seeing and hearing Bush on TV -- and, of course, what a
number of other people whose opinions I respect say about him.
O'Neill describes Bush, when meeting with his team, as being a blind man
leading deaf men. He says that when Bush appointed him as Treasury
Secretary, he seemed totally detached and didn't ask him a single question.
I have no animus against Bush as a person. It is just that he is a person
of such pathetically limited abilities that he ought not to be a leader of
a large and powerful nation. Thank goodness he is so limited in
intelligence and experience that he does as he is told by others. The
problem is that his chief mentors and manipulators, Cheney and Bush Senior,
refuse to be questioned in the normal way that one expects in a democracy,
so one can't examine what are the real reasons for their decisions.
The way that political leaders are now increasingly chosen according to
their performance on TV augurs badly for the future of the nation-state and
suggests that our electoral procedures have reached the end of their
usefulness.
KH
