Wesley Clark and Paul O'Neill

[Mattforclark]

On the Dean campaigns flier against Clark (as well as on the lips of lots of other persons with anti-Clark agendas) it says:

*

WESLEY CLARK: REAL DEMOCRAT?

Clark PRAISED Bush and Cheney Until Deciding to Run for President

May 2001: "As you look around the world, there's a lot of work to be done. And rm very glad we have got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell. Don Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney. Condoleezza Rice. Paul O'Neill, people I know very well. our president George W. Bush. We need him there. . ."

* - (context not provided, of course. The rest of the speach in which Clark talks about how we must pursue a multilateral foreign policy is mysteriously not quoted.)



Then O'Neill speaks up about Bush...



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4715-2004Jan9.html

President Bush showed little interest in policy discussions in his first two years in the White House, leading Cabinet meetings "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people," former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill says in an upcoming book on the Bush White House.

O'Neill, who was forced out of his post in late 2002, spoke extensively to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind and offered up 19,000 documents, including private White House transcripts and personal notes for the book "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill."



I think O'Neill also has some interesting thoughts on context.



O'Neill, a former chief executive of aluminum giant Alcoa Inc., frequently complained that the media oversimplified his comments and took them out of context. He told his hometown Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Thursday, "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. Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the current state of our political process and raise our expectations of what is possible."




I make the bold prediction that this quote will either lapse into disuse or the part about O'Neill will be ignored as extraneous context, just like the rest of the speech has been. It will probably be a combination of the two.

Isn't it funny, how politics works?

[NV1962]

1. Hehe - I liked this one of Paul O'Neil:

President George W. Bush's performance at cabinet meetings resembled that of "a blind man in a room full of deaf people", according to Paul O'Neill

source

[JohnKleeb]

2. I imagine more will come out as the others quit

[Mattforclark]

3. kick