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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mannie who wrote (34869)	1/12/2004 7:47:35 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Message 19682502

To: Mannie who wrote (34869)	1/13/2004 8:27:14 AM
From: jlallen	Respond to of 89467

Yes....IMO, interesting but not persuasive POV.

To: Mannie who wrote (34869)	1/13/2004 8:29:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Savage assault fuels public claims of Bush as warmonger news.ft.com By James Harding and Alan Beattie in Washington The Financial Times Published: January 13 2004 0:38 \| The last time a member of the president's cabinet aired his disaffections with Washington in print, it titillated that small circle of people who relish anecdotes from inside the West Wing. Robert Reich's memoir of Bill Clinton's first term, Locked in the Cabinet, was peppered with juicy stories about lunches with Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, war-weary accounts of Mr Clinton's drift towards the Republican right and unfavourable reminiscences of the role played by political advisers such as Dick Morris. Paul O'Neill's assault on President George W. Bush over the past few days has been altogether more savage. The former Treasury secretary, who was sacked by Mr Bush just over a year ago and did little to disguise his bitterness at his treatment, has been personal. He has stoked the public perception of an airhead, fraternity-boy president: "The president is like a blind man in a room of deaf people," he recalls in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, published on Tuesday. He has fuelled suspicions of a warmongering commander-in-chief. Just 10 days after Mr Bush's inauguration and eight months before September 11 2001, removing Saddam Hussein was "Topic A" on the president's list of priorities, according to Mr O'Neill: "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'," he told CBS television. He told Time magazine: "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction." And Mr O'Neill's criticism has underscored the image of the oilman-turned-president with an unhealthily close relationship with corporate America. He has revealed to Mr Suskind thousands of pages of documents, including a Pentagon memo entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" that includes a list of foreign companies eyeing Iraqi oilfields and maps potential areas for exploration. The White House had initially sought to muffle the attack by trying both to laugh off the criticism and attack Mr O'Neill. Then, over the weekend, the White House made a subtle attempt to characterise Mr O'Neill's comments as the rantings of a bitter man sacked by the president - "an attempt to justify his own world view". But on Monday the Bush administration went on the counter-offensive. The US Treasury announced it had asked the Inspector-General to investigate how documents marked "secret" had come to be aired by Mr O'Neill on television. Mr O'Neill's attack has provided fodder for the Democrats. Joseph Lieberman, one of the nine candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said the "comments about the president's personal leadership are really disconcerting". Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, issued a statement saying: "Now, after the fact, we are learning new information about the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war, this time by one of his former cabinet secretaries." The launch of the investigation will raise the question of whether the administration is persecuting Mr O'Neill for criticising the president. Any criticism from a former Treasury secretary requires at least some attention. But the impact of Mr O'Neill's criticisms is likely to be muted by his mixed record in office. From the beginning he established a reputation as something of a maverick. Following revelations that he had strongly opposed steel tariffs, Mr O'Neill fiercely defended his right to express his views. But some of them provoked bafflement, not debate, as he made a series of apparently contradictory remarks on the dollar and topped them off with insults to Wall Street traders. (Analysts at ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, had a revenge of sorts on Monday, putting out a note pointing out that Mr O'Neill had been a liability to the dollar as Treasury secretary and threatened to continue to be a liability even out of office.) Tom Mann, political analyst at the Brookings Institution, says whether Mr O'Neill's bitter outburst will have much sway now will depend on the broader political conditions: the US recovery and Iraq. "These things [Mr O'Neill's comments] tend not to be independently decisive," he says. Mr Reich, whose own memoir was less of an exposé and more a personal account of "the saga" of being part of the cabinet, says cabinet officers have a loyalty to the president and "a larger loyalty to the public". He adds: "Paul O'Neill has done the public a service by revealing the president was intent on getting rid of Saddam Hussein right from the start. No reasonable, responsible person surrenders his integrity on becoming a cabinet officer."