Thursday, January 15, 2004

WHEN PAUL O’NEILL SOUNDS LIKE TIP O’NEILL


Arianna Huffington: The Ultimate Insider

The picture of a White House teeming with fanatics gets even clearer with O'Neill's depiction of the Bush brain trust's dogged devotion to cutting taxes for the wealthy.

And, before I go any further, one word of advice to the White House attack dogs now unleashed on O'Neill: If you want to belittle his bona fides, you've got to come up with something better than saying "We didn't listen to him when he was here. Why should we now?" Let's get real. Is there anyone more central to developing economic policy than the Treasury Secretary? To be any more inside, O'Neill would have to have been George Bush's proctologist.

Now, of course, they're painting him out to be a cross between Jerry Garcia, Karl Marx and the disgruntled former employee who just shot up your local post office. Yeah, what an anti-establishment wackjob: former CEO of Alcoa, and a friend of Don Rumsfeld's since the sixties.

It's a measure of how effectively the GOP radicals have framed the political debate, with taxes as the root of all evil, that Paul O'Neill, a bedrock-ribbed establishment Republican, comes across like Tip O'Neill.

Hell, it turns out even President Bush had his doubts about the virtue of following his first round of serve-the-rich tax cuts with a heaping second helping. "Haven't we already given money to rich people?" Bush asks at a 2002 meeting of his economic team. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?"

This momentary bout of presidential scruples was quickly cured by Karl Rove. "Stick to principle. Stick to principle. Don't waver," he urged Bush repeatedly. The principle, I suppose, being: "If we wanna win in 2004 we gotta keep our Pioneers and Rangers happy!"

Will this be the wakeup call that finally opens the American public's eyes to the deadly consequences of being governed by a disengaged dolt in the hands of a gang of brazen fanatics?

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