Bush Administration Launchs Investigation of Former Treasury Secretary O'Neil

Where did they deny them? Link please....

 

And your point is? There is no evidence Bush ordered the investigation.

 

Back to topic,

I heard on a news report just now that the investigation may already be over because Paul O'Neil said he received clearance from the General Counsel of the US Teasury Department.

 

not sure where you got the impression i said it was fabricated? i do believe he's rather selectively re-interpreting existing admin policy, trying to extrapolate from contigency planning a "get tough w/ saddam" attitude to "planning for war from the beginning."

 

I was a nerdsy little kid and ran home from schooleach afternoon to catch the hearings. Even to this day, when I have to give a presentation, I try to write it with the cadences and inflection of Sam Ervin. I watched Barbara Jordan's speech live and admired her from that point on.

The big difference between now and yesterday is the polarity. There are a few Repubs in the middle, but none of those hold any real power. There's no Howard Baker or Lowell Weicker around today. There's also no Dem control of either House, so no investigations.

Another big thing is, I doubt that any President would be stupid enough (though there's always hope for W.) to record conversations or record political or decisional info on any media. The tapes were the real turning point for the Watergate investigation.

As far as the political climate goes, I think as long as both sides keep doing what they are doing, the atmosphere will be much less intense than Watergate. I was young, but I don't think we've come close to that type of national angst since... even with Clinton's impeachment.

Adding to this of course, is the press, which seems to have become, in general, part of the establishment rather than a challenger to the powerful. The press at the time of Watergate came out of Vietnam and Korea and had editors from the WWII generation. They had been tested (most in battle) and were hard-nosed about the way the world worked. There was an attempt to be truly objective instead of the current practice of merely reporting two sides of an opinion.

 

basso, thanks for the link. You crack me up.

Maybe you have more AM experience than I do, but what I recall of 90's AM radio was a consistent mantra: "Clinton is the devil. Liberals are his demons. Clinton is the devil. Liberals are his demons... (ad magnum nauseum)."

 

My fault; perhaps it wasn't as equivocal, and I may have amalgamated you with an observation by111chase11 saying that bush haters will blindly accept these allegations as true or someting to that effect.

 

The following article does a fantastic job of EXPOSING O'Neill:

January 13, 2004, 8:39 a.m.
Paul for Himself
The former treasury secretary never did get it.

If you watched Paul O'Neill, George W. Bush's first treasury secretary, in his self-serving interview on 60 Minutes Sunday night, during which he spewed venom at his former White House colleagues, you know that all that was missing was his clown outfit.

By far the best moment of the interview came when Leslie Stahl asked O'Neill if he felt any tinges of guilt for the blind-side kidney punches he was throwing at President Bush. O'Neill coyly played dumb and wondered why anyone would view his portrayal of the president as unflattering. He pretended that he was doing the president a favor, because "After all, all I am doing is telling the truth." Yes, Mr. O'Neill, I'm sure the president is tickled pink that you describe him as disengaged on domestic-policy issues, plotting to overthrow Saddam Hussein from his first day in office, and unable to comprehend the ramifications of the economic policies he was proposing. I'm sure he's equally thrilled that you turned over national-security documents to a reporter writing a hatchet-job book on the Bush presidency.

Even Leslie Stahl couldn't help smirking at O'Neill for being a rat. As such, we learn much more about the real Paul O'Neill than the real George Bush in these interviews.

Let us be clear on one thing about Paul O'Neill: He was one of the worst treasury secretaries in memory. During the height of a currency crisis and meltdown in the stock market, O'Neill was playing the role of a rock groupie as he followed Bono around Africa. Many Washingtonians — probably including President Bush himself — half-hoped he would never come back. He had a penchant for wedging his foot in his mouth, talking down the dollar and the need for tax cuts, and then pathetically blaming every faux pas on his penchant for "telling the truth." He was incapable of dealing with foreign leaders. During his tenure the economy performed miserably — that certainly wasn't his fault but he certainly also did nothing to rectify the bad performance.

O'Neill never understood supply-side economics and was thus a surprise candidate for the treasury slot to begin with. He came from the Richard Nixon wing of the Republican party.

As CEO of Alcoa, he was one the major corporate cheerleaders for George Bush 41's "read-my-lips" tax hike that capsized the elder Bush's presidency. Now he seems hell-bent on bringing down this Bush presidency, perhaps because he's still infuriated over his firing last year. Dick Cheney got him the job — he and O'Neill were buddies when Cheney was the head of Halliburton — -but O'Neill doesn't pull his punches when it comes to the vice president, describing him as a feckless pawn in the White House. (Recommending O'Neill to Bush may be Dick Cheney's only error as vice president.) If Condoleezza Rice was like the Babe Ruth of selections for his top foreign-policy adviser, O'Neill was the Mario Mendoza of the economics team.

The press is having a field day with O'Neill's claim that the 2003 tax cuts — the dividend and capital-gains reductions — were unnecessary and fiscally reckless. One wonders what this man was smoking when he was trooping around the hinterlands in Africa with U2. Ever since the Bush tax cut took effect, the stock market has risen 25 percent, the economy has produced 500,000 new jobs, the economic-growth rate has doubled, and business investment has hit a ten-year high. Again, even Leslie Stahl had to challenge O'Neill on this bizarre attack on the tax cuts by asking him whether they help explain the 8.2-percent growth rate in the third quarter. O'Neill responds, "We would have had six-percent growth without them." Even if he were right, two-percent extra growth from tax cuts is nothing to sneeze at.

Why was O'Neill against a tax cut in 2003? Because he claims he wanted to start the debate on "fundamental tax reform." But, hello! Cutting the capital-gains tax, cutting the dividend tax, lowering tax rates, increasing tax deductions for business investment, is a big leap forward toward tax reform. George Bush is giving us tax reform one bite at a time.

O'Neill just never seemed to be singing from the same hymnal as the rest of the Bush team. This became clear to me when I had a private breakfast with him a few weeks before he was fired — back in October of 2002. (He said, affably, that he wanted to meet the guy who was always criticizing him in the press.) My agenda item for the meeting was to impress upon him the importance of a tax-cut stimulus oriented toward helping investors and reversing the $5 trillion in losses that the economy has already absorbed under this president's tenure.

I was stunned by his opinions. He said a stimulus was not needed. He also said that with America about to go to war with Iraq (potentially), it was not, in his opinion, the best time to be picking a partisan fight with the Democrats in Congress over tax cuts. He thought that a "tax cut for the rich" was politically unwise. He saw little value in a capital-gains tax cut.

I continued to press the point that the stock-market collapse, if not reversed, would not only risk capsizing the economy, but could also mean catastrophic losses for Republicans and President Bush in 2004. He said he was not much interested in the politics of these issues, but rather in giving the president sound economic advice. I wondered (not aloud) why he so seldom gave any.

One of the most poignant moments of our meeting came when he asked me whether I really believed that any tax changes could impact the economy or the stock market in the short term. I politely said that policy changes, of course, matter in directing the economy in the right direction and that incentives matter — that's why we're here. He replied: "You know I hear this talk all the time about the value of this tax cut and that tax cut, but I've been in the business world for years and have made major investment decisions, and the idea that these tax changes impact these kinds of real-world decisions is just bulls***. This just isn't how the real world works." I nearly fell out of my chair. How could President Bush have put this confused man in this job, I kept asking myself.

Paul O'Neill never was at all sympathetic to the supply-side and Laffer Curve ideas that are so critical to enhancing economic growth in the short and long term. It was a good thing Bush fired O'Neill when he did and replaced him with the very capable John Snow. O'Neill would have undermined the tax cut. This is a man who is hyper-sensitive to the deficit and to the kinds of income-distributional tables that always lead to the conclusion that tax cuts benefit the people who are already wealthy.

There was one other poignant moment at the end of our meeting. I asked O'Neill about his future plans. "I will stay in this job as long as the president wants me," he declared rather haughtily. He was completely unaware that as we spoke, President Bush was wisely plotting to get rid of him. O'Neill had no idea the hatchet would soon fall.

That was Paul O'Neill as treasury secretary: clueless until 'til bitter end. And with his kiss-and-tell escapade we might also say that Paul O'Neill was classless 'til the bitter end.

 

I guess we shouldn't be concerned that Bush hired such a clueless idiot to begin with?

 

Comical, you play right into my hands. I say that you can't refute the charges made by O'Neill and can do nothing but launch personal attacks, you respond with this character-massacre job from a right wing machete wielder, providing Exhibit A.


PLAYED

 

Gee, Wally, why did president George pick such an awful guy to run the Treasury? I mean, George seems like such a swell guy, and he's really smart and all, right? I guess I'm too stupid to figure it out. Maybe a smart guy like Eddie Haskell can explain it to us.

 

So once he's left the fold, he's the devil?

Are you sure you're not a Yankee fan?

 

The liberals are now calling the man 'clueless' and 'awful' mere seconds after annointing him the King of Credibility. At least Bush recognized his error and fired the clown. You guys are still buying into his blasphemy

HOOK LINE AND SINKER

 

O'Neill's sour grapes attack consisted of his recollections of specific conversations and topics that were outside of the scope of his job.

T-R-A-N-S-C-R-I-P-T-S.

Perhaps one day, when you learn the meaning of that word and understand the concept of the NSC and its members' responsibilities, your posts might develop just a smidgeon of credibility.

 

can you provide a link or a source for your article? random "articles" w/out context serve no purpose.

 

He went back to the well: NRO, Stephen Moore.

Interestingly enough, this is a far cry from what Moore was saying about O'Neill just some 15 months ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23567-2002Nov21?language=printer

 

One wonders what this man was smoking when he was trooping around the hinterlands in Africa with U2.


The fact that you not only printed an article whioch included completely juvenile, speculative at best ad hominems as this says a lot. The fact that you called this 'article' fantastic says more...


...but the fact that you actually chose to highlight this particular passage says, IMO, all that needs to be said about your political priorities and objectivity.

 

glad to be of service. while you're in town, be sure to try the Throwed Rolls at Lambert's. they have free shuttle service from the airport!

 

This isn't some vindictive Democratic operative who just pulled the rug on the Bush Administration. This is a life-long Republican and former secretary of the U.S. treasury. I'd say his opinions of the cabinet carry a little bit of weight.

Is he speaking up because of sour grapes? Maybe. Or maybe it's because he's truly disturbed by the way Bush is running the country. The truth is likely in the middle.

 

No, not at all. I used the word "crackpipe" rather than the word "bong"!