Iacocca rocks.
______________________________________________________________
Thursday, June 15 2006 @ 09:13 PM EDT
blah3.com
Susie Madrak has posted a quote from an interview with Lee Iacocca, and one of her commenters was good enough to provide a link to the full interview in .pdf format. I'll put up the quote Susie ran, and the question immediately following it.
What sort of CEOs do you think George W. Bush and his administration make?
I make speeches for the Washington Speakers Bureau, get $75,000 for 30 minutes, and all I ever say is, “Here’s what management is about. Hire good people and set some basic priorities and objectives.” Well, let’s see how George Bush qualifies. The people that surround him are just friends, and I think most of them are just schmucks, because I know a lot of them. Who runs the country? Cheney, who is getting old and sick and had this hunting accident. And “Rummy,” Rumsfeld, whom I know real well—they’ve been together forever, and they run the country. They had Condoleezza Rice for lunch. I don’t know what she’s got on Bush, but, boy, he believes in her. Other than those three, the mastermind of them of all, the boy genius, is Karl Rove—slime bucket that he is. You’ve got to know him to see how slimy he is.
How would you rate the priorities Bush and his friends have set?
Forget the economy, global warming, our infrastructure of roads and bridges that are rotting away. And forget health care, which is a scandal, and is our Achilles heel. A civilization that doesn’t take care of its young people and their young minds through education, and that doesn’t take care of its aging parents? Do you think our priority was going to Iraq, really? They didn’t have nuclear bombs that I knew of. We’re in a war we should never have gotten into, and yet they haven’t resolved the nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran, so the priorities are wrong. Meanwhile, it’s going to be a half-trillion-dollar war in Iraq. And we brought what to them? Democracy? I think we brought them civil war. We’re after oil. Hitler bombed the hell out of Romania because he wanted the oil fields. Before Pearl Harbor, we forget how we were twisting the Japanese in the wind and shutting off their oil supply. No matter what you talk about, every real confrontation is based on fossil fuel because we’re just hooked on it. Selling nukes to India? Common sense has gone out the window. You can tap my phone without a warrant? Where is the media? I would think they’d be outraged at the way they’ve been conned. And the Democratic Party is sitting on its hands. What are they doing, worrying about running Hillary? Where is our country headed?
We have plenty of opinions on that score, but we’d rather hear yours.
When I go to Europe, they love Americans but they hate Bush and think he’s nuts. Through the debacle of Iraq, I would have first fired all his speechmakers. “Shock and awe,” “axis of evil,” “dead or alive”? That’s old Europe, not new Europe. How can you write shit like that without insulting your friends? Those are fighting words. [Bush] had to call his nanny, Karen Hughes, back from Texas because he needed her to write speeches for Iraq and she wrote most of that shit. It’s time for the press and the loyal opposition, the Democrats, to be enraged and obnoxious. I think the press should stop all this political correctness and just tell it the way it is and not worry where the chips fall. I’m asked to speak at a lot of college commencements, and you don’t want to scare these kids, but we’re in debt for trillions and leaving them the mortgage, saying, in effect, “You pay it back.” Instead of “shock and awe,” we ought to be saying things like, “Cool the rhetoric” and asking, “Where have all the thinkers gone?”
The man is bloody brilliant. Go read the entire interview - because if you want to know why he isn't running for president, he explains that, too...
*The entire article and interview are available here:
joinleenow.org |
