WHEN PAUL O'NEILL SOUNDS LIKE TIP O'NEILL
Arianna Huffington
Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush
administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting
harder by the day. Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing,
diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: the country is
being governed not by the genial figurehead now running toward the center
in hopes of re-election but by a band of out and out fanatics.
On the administration's two defining issues, Iraq and taxes, the former
Treasury Secretary paints a scathing portrait of a cabal of closed-minded
zealots steadfastly refusing to allow anything as piddling as fact,
evidence, or truth to get in the way of their unshakable beliefs and
forgone conclusions.
According to O'Neill, invading Iraq was a Bush goal before he had even
learned where the Oval office supply closet was. It came up just ten days
after the inauguration, at the new president's first National Security
Council meeting. "It was all about finding a way to do it," he says.
"That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do
this.'"
Of course, All the President's Men (and Condi, too!) did just that,
gathering a collection of dubious facts, half-truths, quarter-truths,
and--the House Specialty--no-truths (what "unpatriotic" people would call
lies) to match the desired outcome. A slice of Nigerian yellowcake,
anyone?
But hey, why let a little thing like the truth get in the way of a
perfectly good war?
The picture of a White House teeming with fanatics gets even clearer with
O'Neill's depiction of the Bush brain trust's dogged devotion to cutting
taxes for the wealthy.
And, before I go any further, one word of advice to the White House attack
dogs now unleashed on O'Neill: If you want to belittle his bona fides,
you've got to come up with something better than saying "We didn't listen
to him when he was here. Why should we now?" Let's get real. Is there
anyone more central to developing economic policy than the Treasury
Secretary? To be any more inside, O'Neill would have to have been George
Bush's proctologist.
Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry
Garcia, Karl Marx and the disgruntled former employee who just shot up
your local post office. Yeah, what an anti-establishment wackjob: Former
CEO of Alcoa, and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the sixties.
Anyway, whether or not the cabinet choir of the church of tax cuts
listened to him, O'Neill certainly listened to them, and now he's doing
what this administration makes a fetish of not doing: telling the American
people what their government is really up to. To hear O'Neill tell it,
the true believers surrounding the president, headed by Karl Rove and
O'Neill's one-time patron Dick Cheney, are all devout disciples of the
first commandment of Bush Republicans: thou shalt cut taxes for the
wealthy, no matter what the cost to the greater good. They have all drunk
the supply-side Kool-Aid -- and simply don't care to hear any debate on
this subject. Or on any other for that matter. According to O'Neill,
"That store is closed". To disagree with the Bush clan is according to
their vast, self-serving post 9/11 definition of patriotism, to hate
America.
What's more, in classic fanatical fashion, the inner circle in the Oval
Office displays an utter intolerance of dissent.
When O'Neill, who had the gall to be concerned about the looming fiscal
crisis triggered by the growing budget deficit, argued against a second
round of tax cuts, he was quickly put in his place by Cheney. "Reagan
proved that deficits don't matter," growled the Vice President, blithely
ignoring the nearly 20 years it took to undo the fiscal damage Reagan's
budget-busting had wrought. Besides, added Cheney, sounding less like the
most powerful #2 in history than a kid cajoling his parents into giving
him ice cream because he has cleaned his plate, "We won the mid-term
elections, this is our due." An over-stuffed gift bag for the president's
prosperous donor corps is our due? Is it actually possible to so badly
misread what this country--or, indeed, democracy--is about?
It's a measure of how effectively the GOP radicals have framed the
political debate, with taxes as the root of all evil, that Paul O'Neill, a
bedrock-ribbed establishment Republican, comes across like Tip O'Neill.
Hell, it turns out even President Bush had his doubts about the virtue of
following his first round of serve-the-rich tax cuts with a heaping second
helping. "Haven't we already given money to rich people?" Bush asks at a
2002 meeting of his economic team. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the
middle?"
This momentary bout of presidential scruples was quickly cured by Karl
Rove. "Stick to principle. Stick to principle. Don't waver," he urged
Bush repeatedly. The principle, I suppose, being: "If we wanna win in
2004 we gotta keep our Pioneers and Rangers happy!" Boy Genius, indeed.
The most alarming thing that emerges from O'Neill's revelations is the
total lack of leadership on Bush's part. Just as the president was
finally outgrowing the long-standing rumors that he was a cheerful pawn in
a game he was too dumb to understand, O'Neill applies the paddles to the
"Bush as clown" image, turns on the juice, and yells, "Clear!"
At the very moment that Rove and the Bush re-election team are gearing up
to sell us the president as the macho, heroic cowboy from Crawford who is
going to keep us all safe from terrorists, despots, and Mad Cow meat, here
comes his former Treasury Secretary with his devastating assessment of
Bush as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people".
Will this be the wakeup call that finally opens the American public's eyes
to the deadly consequences of being governed by a disengaged dolt in the
hands of a gang of brazen fanatics? |
