Media Notes
Howard Kurtz
O'Neill V. Bush, Con't.
Tuesday, Jan 13, 2004; 8:40 AM
This is a loyalist White House. People stay on the reservation. Andy, Condi, Karl, Scott, Dan, Ari, Karen. Not a lot of leaking. Everyone seems to have the talking points.
Which is why Paul O'Neill's finger-pointing is causing such a ruckus.
He's an unlikely rebel (though he did hang out with Bono). A straight-arrow corporate type, worked for Nixon-Ford, ran Alcoa, took over the Treasury, didn't have a great political ear but certainly didn't seem like the man to blow the whistle on his former boss.
Yet there he was, on "60 Minutes," with Time, talking about how the president wanted to take out Saddam from the opening days of his administration, as O'Neill charges in Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty":
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'" And Bush in meetings was "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
"He never asked a single question?," Lesley Stahl wondered.
"As I recall, it was mostly a monologue," said the white-haired O'Neill.
Now, apparently, the empire is striking back.
"The U.S. Treasury has asked the U.S. inspector general's office to investigate how a possibly classified document appeared on Sunday in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a department spokesman said on Monday," according to Reuters.
"'It's based on the "60 Minutes" segment, and I'll be even more clear -- the document as shown on "60 Minutes" that said "secret,"'" Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols told reporters at a weekly briefing.
And the prez himself had to respond:
"President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul H. O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, that the White House was looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the very beginning of his administration," says the New York Times.
"Responding to an account provided by Mr. O'Neill in a book to be published on Tuesday, 'The Price of Loyalty,' by Ron Suskind, Mr. Bush said he was working from his first days in office on how to carry out an existing national policy of promoting a change of government in Iraq. But the president said his focus at the time was on re-evaluating the ways in which the United States and Britain were enforcing the 'no flight' zones in northern and southern Iraq."
Besides, he noted, the Clinton administration was for regime change too.
Dan Kennedy thinks all this should be huge news:
"The principal revelations by former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill - that the Bush administration began planning to go to war against Iraq almost from the moment it took office, and that even George W. Bush questioned huge tax cuts for the rich before gutlessly signing on - are staggering.
"It is an incredible indictment of the state in which we find ourselves these days that it probably won't make any difference."
Josh Marshall sees an anemic defense:
"Oh, they can do better than that, can't they?
"CNN's headline story on the O'Neill story reads: 'Cabinet members defend Bush from O'Neill.' And then, when you click through, it turns out the cabinet members are Don Evans (the president's Texas crony and political fixer) and John Snow (O'Neill's tepidly respected successor at Treasury).
"None of the bigs? That's all? No Colin? We're Rummyless?"
National Review's Jay Nordlinger says this can't be swept under the rug:
"Bush will have to deal with these Paul O'Neill charges. He and his people can't just let them lie and say, "Oh, the public'll figure out that this is just an embittered old guy who was fired." O'Neill has made quite serious charges, and they deserve quite serious answers. Mr. O'Neill is not a left-wing, Bush-hating flake. (Well, he may be Bush-hating, but the other things, he is not.)
"In my view, the White House often takes the doctrine of non-response too far. 'Oh, the public'll see through it.' No, they won't. Why should a former Treasury secretary be automatically dismissed? Bush himself should answer O'Neill's accusations, if only to shake his head and sigh over them."
Reason magazine takes vigorous issue with NR:
"In response to Paul O'Neill's recent revelation that the Bush Administration began planning the ouster of Saddam Hussein eight months before the 9/11 attacks, the folks at National Review Online have mounted a counterattack, which consists of observing that O'Neill is 'a pompous, self-indulgent prima donna' (twice); that he 'is considered a menace by those who want to trim federal spending'; that it "was his policy to charge people to attend the company Christmas party"; and that he was 'a flake.'
"The bearing this has on the exploitation of a national tragedy to launch a war the administration wanted for independent reasons? (Cue Jeopardy music...)"
OpinionJournal's John Fund faults O'Neill:
"I once had dinner with Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary who is now making headlines with a scathing portrayal of his days in the Bush administration prior to his firing in December 2002. Bush critics will hail Mr. O'Neill as a truth-teller, White House aides are already calling him a back-stabber. In fact, Mr. O'Neill is a relic. The man I broke bread with was clearly a product of the Nixon and Ford administrations, in which he had served, and simply hadn't adapted to the post-Reagan Republican Party...
"Mr. O'Neill was a fish out of water in the Bush administration. Time magazine reports that he considered himself, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Secretary of State Colin Powell to be 'three beleaguered souls ... who shared a more nonideological approach [but] were used for window dressing.' Mr. O'Neill tells Ron Suskind, the author of a new book that tells Mr. O'Neill's side of his tour at Treasury, that the three moderates 'may have been there, in large part, as cover' for the administration's conservative agenda.
"But it wouldn't have taken much for Mr. O'Neill to figure out that on issues his new boss would more resemble Ronald Reagan than Nixon, Ford or the first George Bush." |
