Paul O’Neill, a former Treasury secretary who broke with George W. Bush over tax policy and then produced a book critical of the administration, died Saturday. He was 84.
Remember when adults governed?
good times…
Yeah, but I thought that started after the Cheney administration left office.
Were you alive during the Shrub administration? There were no adults in it.
There were known unknowns.
What’re the chances of a similar book in a year or two about this administration?
They’ll need an entire bookstore to stock all the entries.
Kinder, gentler days, when at least some Republicans had an interest in actual governance, however misguided.
He was cool. Said something about discussing the economy with the Bush economic team, was like a blind man talking to a room full of deaf people. He grew up dirt poor and never took up with the country club set.
A decent man.
Many examples could illustrate.
Here’s a couple: Just as he bucked Cheney’s tax cuts and was fired for it; at Alcoa, too, he had fought his own Board of Directors. For example, he wanted to eliminate work-place injuries and illnesses – and, no thanks whatsoever to his Board, he almost succeeded, reducing the number of lost work-days at Alcoa by nearly ninety percent. Few other American corporations came close, mostly because few other CEOs cared as much.
By and large, the Cheney Administration employed awful human beings, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t adults, does it?
As for less-awful humans: there was O’Neill, perhaps, and maybe Christine Todd Whitman (as you probably recall, she, too, felt she had to make her policy objections public – and was fired).
If it’s true, as O’Neill says in his book, that W. was planning the war on Iraq from his first day in office, then that suggests yet another reason we should view the government’s explanation of 9-11 with greater skepticism.
It is true. I knew we were going to war with Iraq and said so to my husband the minute the SCOTUS handed down Bush v Gore.
Forced perspective gag as we say in the biz
I loathed dubya
but the republican white hairs he had in his administration could actually tie their own shoes
The silver lining to this sh!t Show is 45 and his crew are so incompetent it crowds out a small portion of evil.
Here’s a thought experiment, Imagine a Ted Cruz administration.
32nd thru 42nd admins all pre date BHO and had a share of adults
as to whether one agree with them or not is a different matter… … …
There was a time in history when Republicans were sane. Very few meet that qualification now, and many have been driven away. Mitt Romney is the only GOP Senator to vote to convict IMPOTUS. Justin Amash, a founder of the Liberty caucus, left the GOP.
What remains in the GOP are unethical opportunists (e.g. Ted Cruz, Bill Barr) and clowns (e.g. Louie Gohmert).
.
10 years ago I could count my republican friends/acquaintances on both hands. One went MAGA
The rest went sane. Now I don’t have a single republican in my life.
This is why I get frustrated when the MSM reports on how divided the country is as if they cant see the explanation right in front of them.
We have very similar experiences. A long time ago, I was a Republican, but that feels like a very different lifetime. The party of Eisenhower is gone. How long has it been since we had a GOP administration that actually was “fiscally responsible/conservative”?
Note: there is a difference between “fiscal responsibility” and “fiscal conservatism”, since the former recognizes that the government must spend in order to keep the economy moving and minimize pain while otherwise taxing to build reserves for leaner days. The latter originally described the condition of lean government and getting what you paid for. Nowadays, the definition of “fiscal conservatism” has been trashed by Dubya/Cheney giving tax cuts and paying for two wars on our credit card, and BLOTUS IMPOTUS giving tax cuts for the filthy rich and bloating our debt by trillions…and that was BEFORE the pandemic hit.
The GOP is not a party of Conservatism.
The GOP is a party of grifting, corruption and rank incompetence.
I hate it when I start to feel nostalgic for people who I thought were hypocrites at the time. I still think Bush 43 was a terrible president but have rethought my disdain for Bush 41. Paul O’Neill seems to be cut from the same cloth as Bush 41 – that extinct breed of Republican that believed in governance.
The unholy alliance between the Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the pitchfork crowd began with Nixon the Southern strategy but came in to stark relief during the Bush 41 administration, which was undone by challenges from the right. Bush 43 was not going to let that happen to him, so he paid more attention to feeding the beast. By 2016, the beast had become so powerful within the GOP, that it could no longer be controlled.
So (sigh) RIP Paul O’Neill
Wow. A Treasury Secretary who wasn’t a Wall St conman, but actually ran a company that built something. Even after he fled the Bush crime family, he worked to help people get health care, instead of make billions moving piles of money around. He’s the kind of Republican I used to respect, not the people who worked for 43.
It’s interesting how these truth tellers come out during or after Republican administrations. Under Reagan there was David Stockman and later on Bruce Bartlett who called out the fallacy of supply side economics. Then under W. Bush there was Paul O’Neil, a fairly sensible old line Republican who saw the error or just plain malfeasance in their policies. There was also the fellow who was running the faith based initiative who later said it was just a Rovian ruse to cater to evangelicals.