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From the Opinion Journal on .....
The O'Neill Kerfuffle
Remember Paul O'Neill? Neither did we, but he was President Bush's first Treasury secretary. Gently shown the door a little over a year ago, O'Neill has resurfaced, having collaborated on a new book, "The Price of Loyalty," by erstwhile Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. O'Neill is now a critic, sort of, of the Bush administration, and for about 36 hours--between the time "60 Minutes" aired Sunday and the time "Today" aired today--he was a hero of the Angry Left, driving former Enron adviser Paul Krugman into a frenzy of excitement.
Krugman credits O'Neill with showing "courage" by "giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration." Among other things, O'Neill reveals that President Bush wanted to cut taxes. But didn't he make some mention of that in the 2000 campaign? "Most startling of all," Krugman writes, "Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001."
Why does Krugman find this "startling"? As O'Neill himself said on "Today" today, "People are trying to make a case that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually, there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be regime change in Iraq." He continues:
One of the candidates had said this confirms his worst suspicions. I'm amazed that anyone would think that our government, on a continuing basis across political administrations, doesn't do contingency planning and look at circumstances. Saddam Hussein has been this forever. And so, I was surprised, as I've said in the book, that Iraq was given such a high priority. But I was not surprised that we were doing a continuation of planning that had been going on and looking at contingency options during the Clinton administration.
It's cute, too, how last week the Angry Left was denouncing the Bush administration for having "no plan" for Iraq, and now the complaint is that it did have a plan.
"There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book," Krugman raves. "All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good." But the Associated Press notes that O'Neill doesn't share Krugman's enthusiasm:
Asked if he plans to vote for Bush in November's presidential election, O'Neill said he "probably" would. "I don't see anyone who is better prepared or more capable," he told NBC.
This underscores why the Democrats are in such deep trouble. So effectively have they convinced themselves of an absurdly overwrought case against President Bush that they've forgotten you can't beat an incumbent without a plausible challenger--and thus they seem likely to end up with Howard Dean, or maybe Wesley Clark. But we'd better stop there; we don't want to ruin the story by telling you how it ends.
11:43:04 PM 
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the armed forces of the United States. 
