A BUSH BASH BACKFIRES
NY POST
January 14, 2004 -- <font size=4>It will be interesting to see whether the liberal media, having slobbered all over former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's "red meat" attacks on President Bush, will pay as much attention to the fired Cabinet official's follow-up remarks.
Interviewed yesterday on NBC's "Today" show, O'Neill said that despite the harsh criticism of his former boss, he will "probably" vote for Bush in November. "I don't see anyone who is better prepared or more capable," he said.
Effectively, he recanted.
Why?
O'Neill apparently now realizes that his criticism of the White House - eagerly seized by the president's Democratic foes - was way off target.
He seemed from the start to have questioned a lot of the policies on which Bush was elected.
If he was so opposed, why did he take the Treasury job - and then do it so badly that he ended up getting fired?
But it is regarding the war in Iraq that O'Neill is so fundamentally wrong - and where his loose-lipped remarks are intended to do the most political damage.
O'Neill argues that the president and his top aides were "obsessed" from the start with Saddam Hussein - and that they'd begun plotting, even before 9/11, to remove the Iraqi leader from office.
This clearly is meant to provide ammunition to those who contend that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda as an excuse to topple Saddam - for no particularly good reason.
Except that what O'Neill and his newfound fans seem to have forgotten is that toppling Saddam has been official U.S. policy since Bill Clinton was in office.
Back in 1998, Congress - by a near-unanimous vote - passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declares it the policy of the United States "to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
Which is precisely what President Bush has done.
And what he should have been doing - and, if O'Neill is to be believed, was doing - even if 9/11 had never happened.
Little wonder, then, that O'Neill now says, in retrospect, he'd "take back" his description of the president and his cabinet as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
They were doing their jobs - fairly successfully, so far.
Too bad that the same can't be said for the former secretary.
Not at all.
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