What we really need

Is more people like Katherine Gun.

I'm glad Paul O'Neill is willing to tell his story now, but we need people who are willing to tell their stories while they're happening. I recognize that it is a huge risk. Ask any number of people who have lost their jobs for speaking the ugly truth. And if you can commune with the dead, you'll have a whole lot more witnesses.

And I also recognize that, if a person loses his or her position, that person will no longer be able to collect information, but there's a trade-off that I think is worth it due to the fact that the American attention span is about 10 seconds.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, pushed out of the administration for not being a team player, says President Bush was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged president who didn't encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.  article

Encourage debate? Like this, you mean...

"I'm the commander. See, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." --- pResident George W. Bush   source

If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator. -- Governor George W. Bush   source

No, he doesn't strike me as the type who would encourage debate.

Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage (Bush) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

Well, Paul, he doesn't read. He relies on his experts around him to tell him what's happening. Apparently you didn't tell him what he wanted to hear.

Asked about O'Neill's comment about a disengaged president, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday, "I think it's well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."

Now isn't that interesting? What do you get from that? I get: yep, that's our man.

O'Neill was apparently not a disinterested party, as the former head of Alcoa Aluminum. You'd think he had similar interests as others surrounding Little Caeser.

O'Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O'Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.

O'Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.

O'Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits.

Well, there you go, Paul. I knew you must have said something he didn't want to hear.

The Tantrum in Chief reminds me of a guy I used to know who was never satisfied with having his way. He insisted everybody also agree that his way was the right way. Arrested development. And then some.

(I would have probably characterized him as a deaf man in a room full of blind people. And I expect Paul can look forward to some accusations of discrimination or something from deaf and blind associations. And from Republicans stirring up the stink over the remark.)