Blumenthal on O'Neill: A Rebel Republican

[kskiska]

One of the tacit operating assumptions of the Bush administration is that the checks and balances have been checked. But that implacable wall has been cracked by an insider's surprising confessions. The former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, fired and forgotten, mild-mannered and grey, appears an unlikely dissident. He was, after all, the CEO of Alcoa, a pillar of the Republican establishment.

More is involved with him than pride and pique. While O'Neill records slights and is dismissed by some as a dotty reject, he does more than tell a few tales in the book The Price of Loyalty. The attack on him, consistent with Bush efforts to intimidate anyone who challenges the official version, underscores the inherent fragility of Bush's public persona, upon which rests his popularity. Bush's greatest political asset is his image as a masterful commander in chief who happens to be a nice man. Alongside him, Dick Cheney is viewed as the sagacious Nestor.

O'Neill's persuasiveness and the long-term damage he does to these icons comes from his years in the Nixon and Ford administrations and his first-hand critique of a government radically unlike any before, especially Republican ones. O'Neill's threat is to a president unusually dependent in an election campaign on fear and credibility to sustain a sense of power and inevitability. He sounds an alarm against an unfit president who lacks "credibility with his most senior officials", behind whom looms a dark "puppeteer", as O'Neill calls the vice-president, and a closed cabal.

(snip)

O'Neill's revelations cut deeper than mere polemics. They have been met not by any factual rebuttal but by anonymous character assassination from a "senior official" - "Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"

Then the White House announced O'Neill was under investigation for abusing classified documents, though he said they were not and the White House had shovelled carefully edited NSC documents to Bob Woodward for his shining portrait of Bush at War. Quietly, O'Neill and his publisher prepared an irrefutable response. Soon they will post each of the 19,000 documents underlying the book on the internet. The story will not be calmed.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1123443,00.html

[KoKo]

1. Bluementhal has to write for the Guardian, now. The US Corporate Whores

won't publish his work. Sad, isn't it. But, it frees him up to tell more truth that he could ever write here, these days.

[kskiska]

3. This article is also in Salon

under a different title, "He Cannot Tell a Lie." Salon seems to pick up all Blumenthal's articles, or vice versa.

[Dudley_DUright]

4. Just read the Salon version

I was just about to post it, but saw your Guardian article first.

[Zo Zig]

2. Sweet

19,000 documents on the internet!!!
"And the walls came down, all the way to hell..."

He sounds an alarm against an unfit president who lacks "credibility with his most senior officials", behind whom looms a dark "puppeteer", as O'Neill calls the vice-president, and a closed cabal.

You gotta love it, the truth will make you free.

[demgrrrll]

5. Exxxxxxxxxcellent. I can't wait to dig through some of the muck n/t.

.

[TheDalaiMama]

6. Greenspan and Whitman are mentioned a lot in the book...

I wondered if greenspan approved..I also wondered who took all the notes...the book is a good read.