O’Neill’s Talking, but Nobody’s Listening
“Thank you, Paul O’Neill,” wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Philadelphia Inquirer asserted, “Sadly, too much rings true in O’Neill’s shocking account of cabinet meetings that were ‘like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.’” The San Francisco Chronicle cited The Price of Loyalty for seconding “the Carnegie report’s call for an independent commission to investigate the administration’s alleged misuse of intelligence evidence.”
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“In interviews and a new book, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has called into question both the integrity and capabilities of President George W. Bush. But the Bush administration’s response–launching an investigation into whether Mr. O’Neill illegally took classified documents–comes off as petty and vindictive. The probe is not worth pursuing” –Orlando Sentinel.
Another pro-Bush paper, the Hartford Courant, focused on what O’Neill had to say about Iraq: that the Bush administration had regime change as a goal from the day it took office, and that in his two years in that administration O’Neill saw no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. A “useful revelation,” said the Courant.
In O’Neill’s eyes, the president didn’t measure up as a thinker or a leader. O’Neill’s old friend Dick Cheney, as influential a figure as the president in Suskind’s account, was more complicated. Suskind writes that O’Neill confided in Cheney, believing him to be a pragmatist and honest broker even if weirdly inscrutable. But when Cheney told him, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” O’Neill rethought everything. “I thought that, clearly, there’s no coherent philosophy that could support such a claim,” he told Suskind. Only ideology could. “I think an ideology comes out of feelings and tends to be nonthinking….You don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.”
It’s exciting news that the Sun-Times is being sold, exciting in the sense of a doctor telling you that the thing you used to have has shown up again and you’re going to need another operation.
Not that it took any time to locate a former Scotsman staffer who despised them. A writer who held a variety of positions there told me that the Barclays are “egregious moneygrubbing Thatcherites whose interest in newspapers is very straightforward–how much money can we make? They find a placeman, a viceroy, they can install, and leave the daily operation to him. He’s someone they can rely on to be more outrageously reactionary than they are. Scotland is overwhelmingly left-leaning and progressive. The Barclay brothers present an unapologetic, unreconstructed, Reaganite economic agenda. They fly in the face of everything their readers cherish.
