Lots of stories out there today. This link here happened to be handy.
Let’s call this what it is; A bitter old man.. bitter he got canned.
It’s a bit more complex than this, of course, but that’s really the bottom line.
Of COURSE O’Neill never saw any evidence… he was being kept out of the loop as a known idiot, and a loose cannon.
It amazes me… the short memory that the left has. It was just two short years ago that he was the brunt of jokes form the left. Even the leftist BBC is forced to remark this morning:
“Billed as a “steady hand” by Mr Bush, Mr O’Neill in fact proved surprisingly wobbly.
Lacking urgent projects to keep him busy (the US economy was still in pretty swell shape in 2001), he demonstrated a habit of shooting his mouth off to the nearest available microphone.
He called the US tax code “9,500 pages of gibberish”, fretted publicly that Brazilians would embezzle international aid, and sent the currency plunging by appearing to deny the US strong-dollar policy.
He told financial-market traders that he could learn their job “in about a couple of weeks”, castigated Argentina for “continuing to consume the money of plumbers and carpenters in the US”, and insisted that the safety record of the nuclear industry was impeccable – “except for Three Mile Island and Chernobyl”.
“If people don’t like what I’m doing,” he said, “I don’t give a damn.”
This sort of behaviour made Mr O’Neill a figure of fun on the liberal left, the most prominent klutz in a notoriously tongue-tied cabinet.”……
…..In fact, Mr O’Neill was not a particularly good Treasury Secretary for far more fundamental reasons.
For the most part, his failing was remaining too much of a businessman to appreciate the subtleties of political issues.
“The crises that erupted during his tenure – first Enron, then the broader economic and market meltdown that followed – demanded someone with a deeper knowledge of international finance, not someone from the “shoot-first” school of corporate management. ”
The BBC also demonstrates they understand what’s behind this:
“But Mr O’Neill’s new guise as a crusader for truth should be treated with care, too.
He has a book – ironically titled The Price Of Loyalty – to promote, something this weekend’s news will have achieved handsomely. “
Looks like, barring unforseens, I have next week’s column half written, already.
