From the start, O'Neill rowed against the Bush team

[candy331]

{The rantings and butt sucking of novak the ? you call it.)

From the start, O'Neill rowed against the Bush team
January 15, 2004

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

George W. Bush's inner circle had been braced for weeks for Paul O'Neill's kiss-and-tell book, and so was not surprised when he attacked the president he served. From the Bush administration's first day, O'Neill as secretary of the Treasury proved nothing but trouble. He was Dick Cheney's big mistake.

( uhm! did they really know about the book and did no damage control?)


O'Neill never would have been considered for the Bush Cabinet had it not been for Vice President Cheney, his colleague in government dating back to the Nixon administration's first year. Cheney realized immediately that O'Neill at the Treasury was no team player but a disruptive influence opposing the president's plans while poisoning morale in his own department. O'Neill, as protagonist in The Price of Loyalty by journalist Ron Suskind, repays the vice president by describing him as a sinister force.

O'Neill choosing as his amanuensis Suskind, who embarked years ago on a deconstruction of the Bush White House, suggests vindictiveness after being sacked late in 2002. The book has attracted the most attention by asserting the Bush team was preparing to attack Iraq even before 9/11, but O'Neill, by his own admission, offered little input to foreign policy. Suskind is inadvertently most valuable in exposing O'Neill's role as the president's hair shirt, not his advocate, on economic policy.


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www.suntimes.com/output/novak

[lovedems]

1. Novakula is just another scum of the earth idealogue

I can't STAND that man. He always thinks he is right and doesn't like dissent. I hope bob gets busted.

[Fovea]

2. Let us think about that.

With fore knowlege, the Cheney/Rove administration responded with a quip that Pee Wee Herman would have thought lame.

Wow, Novak, you really have lost it, haven't you?

[BigBigBear]

3. Just because

O'Neill "offerred little input to foreign policy" doesn't make the charge O'Neill makes any less true.

It's a nice thing to watch Novak self-contorting to please his administration minders. Despicable, useless old POS.

Hey Bob - who leaked Valerie Plame to you, you hasbeen, self-serving Republican cabana boy. You like being Rove's poodle?

[DoctorMyEyes]

4. I'm a little more than halfway through the book

and if the REAL conservatives, moderates, "anyone left with a brain on the right" reads this it will not matter what anyone like Novack says.

There's no spinning it. It's damning. Ultimately ,no, he wasn't a team player - and for good reason. I recommend the book - highly!

[TheDalaiMama]

5. Suskind approached O'Neill....then O'Neill gave him all the cd's

without looking at them...dontcha love it?

The book is an easy read...buy it..it's worth every penny.

He confirmed for us what a puppet show the white house really is. The puppet master is Cheney...the puppet is..shrub.

Gee we DUers could have written that scene.

[DoctorMyEyes]

6. Very easy read

and not much in it will come as any surprise to most of us - but still worth the read.

I had to put the book down and laugh out loud for a while about the first meeting O'Neill had with Bush concerning SS reform. What is Bush, like 7 years old?

I don't agree with a lot of O'Neill's positions, but it's an interesting "insider glimpse" from an old fashioned Republicans perspective.