[fl-929]

Or is someone else at the helm?


Link

O'Neill Calls Bush a Disengaged President
Fri Jan 9, 6:58 PM ET Add White House - AP Cabinet & State to My Yahoo!


By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, pushed out of the administration for not being a team player, says President Bush (news - web sites) was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged president who didn't encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.

To promote the book which will be out Tuesday, O'Neill was appearing Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl.

In an excerpt of the book released by CBS, O'Neill said that a lack of real dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the first two years of the administration and gave O'Neill the feeling that Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying that the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."

O'Neill said in his CBS interview that the atmosphere was similar during the one-on-one meetings he held with Bush.

Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage (Bush) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

O'Neill is described as the principal source for the new book, "The Price of Loyalty," being published by Simon and Schuster, and written by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to interviews with O'Neill, Suskind drew on 19,000 documents O'Neill provided, according to CBS, which said Suskind also interviewed dozens of Bush insiders to flesh out his account of the administration's first two years.

Asked about O'Neill's comment about a disengaged president, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday, "I think it's well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Asked about the administration's opinion of the upcoming book, McClellan said, "I don't do book reviews."

O'Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, did not immediately respond to phone messages from The AP left at his office in Pittsburgh. But in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, O'Neill said he hoped his inflammatory comments did not overshadow the substantive issues he discusses in the book.

"If the 'red meat,' taken out of context, is all that people get out of this book, it will be a huge disappointment to me," he said. "Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the current state of our political process and raise our expectations for what is possible."

O'Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O'Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.

O'Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.

O'Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow, former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.

[Baketech]

Sour grapes because he was shitcanned....

[DCEMotorsports]

I guess a read is in order to understand the focus. Corporate politics demand that the staff march to the same tune and spew the latest dogma to the workers. No reason to think the Bushites would do anything different.

Who knows, maybe what Oneil is trying to convey is larger than the obvious sour grapes? Then again, maybe not?

[Baketech]

Originally Posted by DCEMotorsports

Who knows, maybe what Oneil is trying to convey is larger than the obvious sour grapes? Then again, maybe not?

You must have forgotten the stupid off the cuff crap he "conveyed" that caused him to be shitcanned in the first place.....


Here are just a few......

So... you want a weak dollar?
Shortly after being named to his Treasury post in December 2000, O'Neill sent the U.S. dollar into a tailspin when he told a German newspaper that the United States wasn't interested in "pursuing... a policy of a strong dollar." Why? Because "a strong dollar was the result of a strong economy."

The world took note, and traders sank the dollar. The Treasury scrambled to cover its bases, issuing a statement that its long-standing strong-dollar policy (regularly reiterated during the Clinton administration) remained intact.

Brazilian currency samba
Not content to fiddle with the value of the dollar alone, however, O'Neill put in his two cents on the Brazilian currency markets as well. In July 2002, O'Neill managed to offend the government of Brazil one week before he was due to visit the country. His remarks were deemed offensive enough to prompt former president Fernando Cardoso to demand a retraction.

O'Neill had made public remarks that Brazil should enact "sound policies, so that aid does some good and doesn't just go out of the country to Swiss bank accounts." After that jab at the Brazilian government, Brazil's currency lost 5 percent of its value, as jittery traders worried about the effect O'Neill's remarks would have on a possible International Monetary Fund loan.

Just two days later, in an attempt to dislodge his foot from his mouth, O'Neill remarked that Brazil's government had been building "a strong foundation for real economic activity thanks to its remarkable job of maintaining sound fiscal and monetary policies."

Enron? It happens
Take the collapse of Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the United States, which filed for bankruptcy after a web of partnerships and questionable accounting fell apart. The company's fall caused huge losses for investors and left its employees' 401(k) accounts virtually worthless.

Despite the sudden shakeup, O'Neill didn't take it too hard.

"Companies come and go," he said to Fox News Sunday in January 2002, when asked if he was surprised by Enron's sudden fall. "It's...part of the genius of capitalism."

Social Security is for wimps
Today, debate on the fate of the Social Security Trust Fund looms large, given budget deficits and a costly war on terrorism. Younger Americans want to know whether Uncle Sam will be able to provide them with significant benefits when it's their turn to put their feet up for good.

But as far as retirement goes, O'Neill downplayed any worries about the future retirement of millions of Americans in a May 2001 interview with the Financial Times.

"Able-bodied adults should save enough on a regular basis so that they can provide for their own retirement and for that matter for their health and medical needs. Because to the extent that able-bodied adults who are earning a reasonable income don't do it, they are basically saying they want the broader society to accept the responsibility for part of their retirement and part of their health and medical care."

Why are you looking at me?
Perhaps the Washington Post best summed up the problem. An editorial from August 2002 mentioned that O'Neill still hadn't accustomed himself to the fact that his words effectively moved markets.

"I'm constantly amazed that anybody cares what I do," he'd said a few days earlier.

In short.....the fact that this guy got shitcanned proves that Bushy was not asleep at the wheel. The guy was a loose cannon with his mouth, and was axed for it, it's not surprising that he would continue running off at the mouth...

Ooops.....almost left out my favorite....

"If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good." _ May 21, 2001 speech to a business group.

[CBRVFR]

Quote:
"If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good." _ May 21, 2001 speech to a business group.

[Baketech]

Ummm....someone just put the ball back into play....

Secret Documents Mishandled?

[CBRVFR]

If you set aside the secret document he misappropriated and then displayed on national TV and the fact that, as secretary of the treasury/ CEO of a company that makes beer cans, he wouldn't know a Weapon of Mass Destruction if one was crawling up his ass, his security record is really very good.....

[BDA116]

Originally Posted by CBRVFR

If you set aside the secret document he misappropriated and then displayed on national TV and the fact that, as secretary of the treasury/ CEO of a company that makes beer cans, he wouldn't know a Weapon of Mass Destruction if one was crawling up his ass, his security record is really very good.....

C'mon CBRVFR and Bake. You guys forget about the double standard the media gives. Whether this document was secret and illegally taken is irrelevant. He was making noise against Bush, the man the media loves to hate and print hateful stories of - no matter how full of lies they are.
This is the same media that will not only completely gloss over, but choose to not even report when a certain Senator makes racist statements like "Mahatma Ghandi used to run a gas station in St. Louis" - if that Senator is the worthless waste of flesh hitlary klinton (D), yet distort statements that another Senator made into racism when it never was racism if that Senator's name is Trent Lott (R).
If O'Niel used illegal papers and goes to jail, the lefties will make a hero out of him, disregarding the fact that he violated law and security issues. To them, he's a 'whistleblower', even though his statements are lacking fact.
Yet, when ex-klinton cabinet members speak out against the klintons, these people are liars and not to be listened to.

[Proto]

I'm not sure how this has been reported in the US, but here is how the O'Neil kerfuffle was reorted.

The Independent


P.S. This is how the nations favourite Right Wing paper reported the same issue.

The Daily Telegraph