More on O'Neill's Revelations About the Prez

Drudge has posted a report by CBS News today that seems to confirm that the 60 Minutes interview with Paul O'Neill tomorrow evening will be "must see" watching. Our VCR will be whirring. (available locally tomorrow at 7 p.m., Dec. 11th, on both Channel 11 and Channel 3)

O'Neill talked to CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl for the interview and told her that Bush's advisors were planning on an invasion of Iraq "within days" of his inauguration, not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, "as has been previously reported."

O'Neill's comment: "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."

Much of the 60 Minutes segment appears to be focused on a new behind-the-scenes account of the Bush administration written by Ron Suskind. Suskind was depending on insights and documents supplied by O'Neill (among other unnamed sources). The book is titled The Price of Loyalty.

Suskind writes in his book that in a White House meeting on his second round of tax cuts, the Prez himself seemed confused and even concerned about taking the wrong path: "Haven't we already given money to rich people," Suskind quotes Bush as saying. "Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" Suskind cites as his source a "nearly verbatim transcript" of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting. O'Neill, incidentally, was fired from his job as Treasury Secretary for opposing the tax cuts.

O'Neill's description of a disengaged President who sat mute and uncommunicative through meetings reminds us of some of the students we saw through 30 years of teaching ... didn't have a clue, hadn't read their assignment, thought if they didn't make eye contact or otherwise move a muscle, maybe they could get away with not being called on ... except that no one calls on this president. Everyone defers to him. He gets away with it.

"...O'Neill is also quoted in the book as saying the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on 'little more than hunches about what the president might think.' "

Lesley Stahl told The Early Show on CBS Friday, "I would say it's an unflattering portrait of the White House and of the president -- and specifically, about how they make decisions."

For the true believers, that'll all be chalked up to "the liberal media" just doing what "the liberal media" always does ... shooting arrows at the Saint Sebastians of God, Country, and American Conservatism.

For his part, O'Neill is a bit naive himself, saying he just can't imagine the Bush White House (the same structure that houses Karl Rove's office? that building?) will attack him for telling the truth about what went on there. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. O'Neill had better get a grip on something solid ... 'cause a tsunami of boiling spit is right now rolling his direction. A "senior administration official" has already told CBS News that "no one ever listened to the crazy things [O'Neill] said before, [so] why should we start now?"

"Crazy things" are said by crazy people, get it? It's a small step across that particular swamp. And we're reminded of the recent labeling of New York Times-man Paul Krugman as mentally unbalanced, by the friends & allies of this White House (yes, that building that houses Karl Rove).