{"id":1014,"date":"2004-01-12T14:45:04","date_gmt":"2004-01-12T21:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/uncategorized\/these-people-are-nasty\/"},"modified":"2004-01-12T14:45:04","modified_gmt":"2004-01-12T21:45:04","slug":"these-people-are-nasty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/these-people-are-nasty\/","title":{"rendered":"These People are Nasty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"CNN.com - Cabinet members defend Bush from O'Neill - Jan. 12, 2004\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2004\/ALLPOLITICS\/01\/11\/oneill.bush\/\">CNN.com &#8211; Cabinet members defend Bush from O&#8217;Neill &#8211; Jan. 12, 2004<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the book, &#8221;The Price of Loyalty,&#8221; by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O&#8217;Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office. <\/p>\n<p>He also compares Bush&#8217;s presence at Cabinet meetings to <b>&#8221;a blind man in a room full of deaf people<\/b>.&#8221; &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>An interview with O&#8217;Neill aired Sunday night on the CBS program &#8220;60 Minutes.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>In it, O&#8217;Neill said <b>the Bush administration was eyeing an invasion of Iraq &#8220;from the very beginning&#8221;<\/b> &#8212; months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that administration officials said changed their strategic perspective. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap,&#8221; O&#8217;Neill said in the interview. <\/p>\n<p><b>&#8220;We didn&#8217;t listen to [O&#8217;Neill&#8217;s] <i>wacky<\/i> ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now,&#8221; said a senior official.<\/b> The official said he informed Bush of O&#8217;Neill&#8217;s comments but declined to describe the president&#8217;s reaction. <\/p>\n<p>Suskind said he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including several Cabinet members who gave him their accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>O&#8217;Neill also told Time magazine he never saw evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq &#8211;Bush&#8217;s primary justification for the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March. <\/p>\n<p>None have been found, although searches have turned up evidence of continuing research on banned weapons. <\/p>\n<p>O&#8217;Neill predicted that his former colleagues &#8212; one of whom has already tried to paint him as a disgruntled former employee with a &#8220;tin ear&#8221; for politics &#8212; would hit back. <\/p>\n<p><b>&#8220;These people are nasty and they have a long memory,&#8221;<\/b> O&#8217;Neill told Time. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>More apt would be that <b>Bush is a deaf man in a country full of blind people<\/b>. mjh<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CNN.com &#8211; Cabinet members defend Bush from O&#8217;Neill &#8211; Jan. 12, 2004 In the book, &#8221;The Price of Loyalty,&#8221; by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, scheduled for publication Tuesday, O&#8217;Neill says administration officials discussed plans to go to war with Iraq as early as their first weeks in office. He also compares Bush&#8217;s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/these-people-are-nasty\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">These People are Nasty<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dump-duhbya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}