I'm with Rog:
I can call former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill a self serving, backstabbing, odious leach-covered blob of quivering slime today, because I called him that while he was still alive as Sec. Treas, and fucking up the economy. Which, of course, is why Bush fired his ass.A more moderate, but less incisive view is provided by John Fund in today's WSJ - Rage of a Relic: Paul O'Neill is angry that the world has passed him by.
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.Oh yeah, he fit right in!
But it wouldn't have taken much for Mr. O'Neill to figure out that on issues his new boss would more resemble Ronald Reagan than Nixon, Ford or the first George Bush. All he had to do was pay attention to Mr. Bush's record in Texas and his 2000 campaign. When Mr. O'Neill accepted the job as Treasury secretary he knew it entailed being a loyal member of a team, dissenting in private if he disagreed with the president's views.
Instead, Mr. O'Neill early on seemed to become a public spokesman for every cause except his boss's policies. He questioned the need for a strong dollar, sending the currency into a nosedive. His tour of Africa with rock star Bono veered into advocacy for action on AIDS, not exactly a brief of the Treasury Department. He also emerged as an aggressive advocate of action on global warming.
Aside from astonishment that politics might be involved with his job, Paulie's biggest complaint is that there were contingency plans for dealing with Saddam even before 9/11. Sheesh, do they let him out without his nanny? Every administration, Donk or GOP, has contingency plans for dealing with riff raff:
"We had the same stuff," says a former senior Clinton Administration aide who worked at the Pentagon. "It would have been irresponsible not to have such planning. We had all kinds of briefing material ready should the president have decided to move on Iraq. In fact, a lot of the material we had prepared was material that the previous Bush administration had left for us. It just isn't that big a deal. Or shouldn't be."Hat tip: Instapundit who observes:
Of course they had the same stuff. And, yes, it would have been irresponsible not to.The only really question is why Paulie's ass wasn't fired sooner.
