PABLO’S REVENGE by Matt Miller Online

That our stunningly incurious president and his top advisers have little interest in such evenhanded decision-making underscores the primary lesson of O’Neill’s book: how radically conservative the Republican Party has become.

Think of O’Neill as some centrist Republican Rip Van Winkle, who came back to a GOP White House after 25 years, only to find that his pragmatic approach to public problem-solving made him an alien to be ignored or a prop to be used for “cover” by zealots.

O’Neill’s tragedy may be that he never realized, before signing on for this last costly hitch of public service, that in the GOP’s view, he was already an antique whose notions of responsible governance had long been purged from the center of Republican power.