| Author | Message | ||
     themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 343 Registered: 12-2001 |
I don't love him, and I know a reasonable amount about him, so clearly you don't mean me. What sort of "insight" leads to mindless allegence to party? I see you have to use the "L" word again in reference to anyone believing anything O'Neill says. Why? That is very low-rent rhetorical gamesmanship. You're not running for anything, so why not be honest with yourself, and acknowledge that O'Neill's comments are informative even if you don't "love" him, and even if he is and always was an ass, and even if he is out for revenge. | ||
| Insite Citizen Username: Insite Post Number: 194 Registered: 10-2002 |
Put it to you this way. I have yet to meet anyone who was fired from a job without bitter feelings towards their ex-employers. This is especially true when we talk about professionals. O'Neill was canned. If he had quit on his own, I'd buy his rhetoric. Not the other way around. | ||
| cjc Citizen Username: Cjc Post Number: 671 Registered: 8-2003 |
Would the CIA give a Treasury Secretary specific intelligence and evidence? His impressions are his impressions -- I'm just wondering how extensive the information was that he based that conclusion on. Is Rumsfeld briefed on the intricacies of Administration policy on the US dollar? Free trade deals? | ||
| JJC Citizen Username: Mercury Post Number: 164 Registered: 12-2002 |
He was a member of the NSC - same as Ms Rice. He had access... | ||
| Nohero Citizen Username: Nohero Post Number: 2693 Registered: 10-1999  |
From the White House Website: I'm sure the "spin" out there is that the Treasury Secretary wouldn't have this type of information, but that's contradicted by the facts. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 344 Registered: 12-2001 |
There is a tremendous amount of ignorance about who he is and where he's been. The shame is that there is a cure for this ignorance. Check out his resume. He isn't just some disgruntled guy who got fired (although he's an ass). He didn't write a book for the money (as one gloating know-it-all on this board stated), and his selection by Bush as Sec Treasury speaks to Bush's bad judgement either way you slice it. Hey remember John J. DiLulio, former head of faith based initiates? He said of Bush and Co: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." Then they made him take the memory erasing pill. I bet they can't get O'Neill to take one. I wonder if when C T Whitman crawls out of the wreck of her career she'll talk crap about W too? He sure made her look like a dope. | ||
| tom Citizen Username: Tom Post Number: 1761 Registered: 5-2001 |
Look at this morning's Times' op-ed page for the answer to your last question. | ||
| cjc Citizen Username: Cjc Post Number: 672 Registered: 8-2003 |
I'll have to read the book I guess, but I'd be very surprised if the Admin had planned a military invasion beyond any contingency plans that exist for Iran, N. Korea, Taiwan. Regime change was the US policy for Iraq pre-Bush, but the only public information was about having a coup, talking to exiles, etc. Bush sitting down in his first NSC meeting saying "we're going to go to war with Iraq" would surprise me. So far -- per the NYT -- O'Neill only said the "tone" was that Saddam should be removed. Well....yeah....and...? I need more information. I know most of you don't. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 345 Registered: 12-2001 |
There you go. Reading books good. | ||
| cjc Citizen Username: Cjc Post Number: 674 Registered: 8-2003 |
Here's part of the US foreign policy decision in 1998 that had broad bipartisan approval in both houses as related by the NY Sun: "Then the Iraq Liberation Act included its famous Section 3 — Sense of the Congress Regarding United States Policy Toward Iraq. This is the formal, legislated foreign policy of America. It said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” And lest this all be seen as theoretical, it went on to authorize $97 million in military support for this. It is true that the Clinton administration resisted spending that money, even though Mr. Clinton signed the law. But we have little doubt that this is why President Bush and his administration began planning, from the moment they entered the White House, for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. It wasn’t some sneaky plot. It’s what the law required Mr. Bush — or any president — to do. That Mr. O’Neill finds this so scandalous is another matter. It suggests that when he went into the administration, he was either out of sync with the law or had an inadequate understanding of the constitutional oath, which imposes on the president an obligation to “faithfully execute” the laws the Congress passes. That the Congress was practically unanimous is but a detail. | ||
| notehead Citizen Username: Notehead Post Number: 848 Registered: 5-2001  |
Cjc, I, for one, would also like more info. It is one thing to have said "one of these days, we're gonna have to get Saddam outta there" and quite another to have had specific plans and timetables prepared and perhaps even green-lighted. I'd like to know how developed the plans were for Saddam's removal prior to 9/11. However, it wouldn't change anything about the current conditions in Iraq, nor would it make anyone more comfortable about the way the administration justified going to war. | ||
| cjc Citizen Username: Cjc Post Number: 675 Registered: 8-2003 |
Well....OK....but 2/3 of the country back going to war, so I don't know where you're getting this. Unless you're speaking about MOL only. And the state of MA. | ||
| Tom Reingold Citizen Username: Noglider Post Number: 1688 Registered: 1-2003  |
2/3 of the country are behind the idea because the administration misled the country. The truth is coming out. I don't know about you, but I get angry when I find out that someone lied to me to get my approval. Tom Reingold the prissy-pants There is nothing | ||
| sbenois Citizen Username: Sbenois Post Number: 10586 Registered: 10-2001  |
2/3 of the country are behind the idea because they were sick and tired of having saddam hussein lie to us. ---> Brought to you by Sbenois Engineering LLC <- Hey, it also wouldn’t look good coming out of a motel with your wife’s best friend saying you were just planning a surprise birthday party for her husband...- Arturo November '03 | ||
| Nohero Citizen Username: Nohero Post Number: 2695 Registered: 10-1999 |
Oh, great. I think we're up to 500 dead so that we could show that ol' Saddam that you can't lie to us. | ||
| sbenois Citizen Username: Sbenois Post Number: 10587 Registered: 10-2001 |
In your antiseptic world where perfection exists and there is no crime, war, death or lying, is Hiilary Clinton allowed to tell offensive jokes about people just because she's a Democrat? ---> Brought to you by Sbenois Engineering LLC <- Hey, it also wouldn’t look good coming out of a motel with your wife’s best friend saying you were just planning a surprise birthday party for her husband...- Arturo November '03 | ||
| Nohero Citizen Username: Nohero Post Number: 2697 Registered: 10-1999 |
I think we have a little cross-thread posting. What the heck does that have to do with this topic? And I agree, there is crime, war, death and lying. We may disagree about where to point the finger at a prime practitioner thereof. | ||
| Michaela May Citizen Username: Mayquene Post Number: 27 Registered: 1-2004  |
Don't forget an estimated 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians. What's worse, a foreign dictator lying to us, or our own president? | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 359 Registered: 12-2001 |
Aint no Hillary here. Just Bush and O'Neill. | ||
| wharfrat Citizen Username: Wharfrat Post Number: 916 Registered: 6-2001 |
From today's NYT January 13, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Awful Truth By PAUL KRUGMAN People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism. But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College. I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul O'Neill's appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn't understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn't resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest. But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration. Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations — satisfying "the base" — trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." But there are many other revelations. One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers — it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out — it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing. Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only "top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?" Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001. There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good. The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist. The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations? So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts. Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work. More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny. |
