Reading notes

Time on Paul O’Neill’s contributions to Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill:

O’Neill had been preaching that a fiscal crisis was looming and more tax cuts would exacerbate it. … In an economic meeting in the Vice President’s office, O’Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. O’Neill was too dumbfounded to respond.

What great news! I’ll run my credit cards up to the max, then, since deficits don’t matter.

According to the book, ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. …

From his first meeting with the President, O’Neill found Bush unengaged and inscrutable, an inside account far different from the shiny White House brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire intensity. … Bush was a blank slate rarely asking questions or issuing orders, unlike Nixon and Ford, for whom O’Neill also worked. …

Each time O’Neill tried to gather data, sift facts and insert them into the system for debate, he would find discussion sheared off before it could get going. He tried to build fiscal restraint into Bush’s tax plan but was thwarted by those who believed, as he says, that “tax cuts were good at any cost.” … The President asked for a global-warming plan one minute and then while it was being formulated, announced that he was reversing a campaign pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions and pulling out unceremoniously from the Kyoto global-warming treaty, short-circuiting his aides’ work.

If you had told me several years ago we’d ever have people this unmoored from facts, thinking, morals, and honor in the White House, I wouldn’t have believed you.

If you had told me that any percentage of the population greater than 1 would embrace such deadly and shameful behavior, I would have said, No way.

If you then told me that people who call themselves Christians would be among these people’s most vocal and unquestioning supporters, I would have said, No, the Spirit provides discernment enough to let us see bald-faced lies and deception and steer clear; Christians could never be that deluded.

What a painful education I’ve gotten in the last three years.

Yet revelation is ever possible, and repentance ever the way out.