Reply #6: Wow! The article is full of fodder: [View All]

[The Backlash Cometh]

Quite a bit of juicy bits, but these three stood out:

1) "As for the appetite for new ideas in the White House, he told Suskind, "that store is closed."

<An Administration that isn't open to new ideas is going to sink us in this environment where we badly need leadership and innovative ideas.>

2) "Where ideology did not win, electoral politics did...

"When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, O'Neill and Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest plan because "the corporate crowd," as O'Neill calls it in the book, complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency"

<So Bush may not be sensitive to general polls from the mainstream public, but he's obviously sensitive to polls to selective constituents. Why does the mainstream support him, when it's obvious that Bush is not concerned about their needs?>

3) "The biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "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."

<Yet, another insider explaining that ideology runs this administration and there aren't any studys to support their decisions. This is the Texan way. They think that might makes right, but instead we're being lead by dumb and dumber.>