Paul O'Neill is angry that the world has passed him by<snippy>
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 hasn't adapted to the post-Reagan Republican Party.Mr. O'Neill came into the Bush Administration on the recommendation of three old friends from the Ford years: Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan, and Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. O'Neill, a moderate Republican, quickly discovered that his friends had changed in the intervening quarter-century. He got little sympathy when he sought them out to express his dissatisfaction with the conservative tilt of the Bush Administration. "The biggest difference between then and now," Mr. O'Neill told reporter Ron Suskind, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl {Rove}, Dick {Cheney}, Karen {Hughes} and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction."
This analysis reveals either
Mr. O'Neill's naivete or poor memory. Richard Nixon's was one of the most cold-bloodedly political administrations in American history, imposing wage and price controls despite overwhelming evidence that they would harm the economy and trundling Henry Kissinger before TV cameras just before the 1972 election to announce that "peace was at hand" in Vietnam. The Ford administration adopted gimmicky tax rebates, passed out silly "Whip Inflation Now" buttons and
ruthlessly squashed the insurgent challenge of Ronald Reagan when he challenged Mr. Ford in the Republican primaries.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 Mr. 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.
much more spin:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110004541__________________________________________________________________
When you're attacked by no less than John Fund (see:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0220/cotts.php ) you are definitely in the Neocon doghouse.
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