THE SIMPLETON AND THE SECRETARY IN WASHINGTON: A review of "The Price of Loyalty"

In the Peter Sellers film classic, Being There, Sellers plays a simple-minded gardener. When Seller's character is asked his view on political subjects, his replies in the film are along the lines of "You need to water flowers in the
spring for them to blossom in the summer".

Sellers� simpleton answers are misinterpreted by the sophisticates around Sellers as being the casting of pearls of wisdom by Sellers, when in fact Sellers doesn't have a clue. In Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, a reporting on the experiences of Paul O'Neill while he was Treasury Secretary, one gets the sense that O'Neill at times wondered if he was dealing with a similar simpleton in the person of President George W. Bush.It�s clear in the book that O'Neill was obviously asking himself, "Does President Bush have a clue?"

Suskind writes:

There were a dozen questions O'Neill expected the president to ask...Bush didn't ask any. He looked at O'Neill not changing his expression..The
President said nothing. No change in expression.

"I wondered from the first, if the President didn't know the question to ask",O'Neill recalled, or did he know and just not to want to know the answers?
Or did his strategy somehow involve not showing what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather information, and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange.

O'Neill started to wonder about the President...The problem O'Neill felt,was that this President's lack of inquisitiveness or pertinent experience... meant he didn't know or really care about the position of the U. S. Government.

O'Neill was watching Bush closely. He threw out a few general phrases, a few nods, but there was virtually no engagement.

As for National Security Council meetings, Suskind writes that O'Neill reports that Bush allowed Condoleezza Rice to run them.

It is these observations alone, of Bush by O'Neill, that will make this an important book for historians studying this Bush Administration. But there is much more we learn from this book. We learn that the Bush Administration in its earliest days was very much focused on regime change in Iraq. Suskind reports:"O'Neill said...'From the start, we were building a case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country...' "

And, of course, we learn about O'Neill. Indeed if one can picture George Bush as in someways the gardener in Being There, O'Neill can certainly be seen as a similar character. A character that just doesn't quite get the Big Picture or the nuances in the little things.

Time after time, O'Neill positions himself as the honest man, the get things done person, the thinking out of the box person, when in fact he bumbles along, misses the important points and finally ends up getting fired. O'Neill's bumbling adventure in Washington would be hilarious, if it wasn't for the seriousness of the topics at hand and the ramifications for America's future.

Some have already declared that George Bush is the worst president the United States has ever had. As O'Neill reveals himself in this book through Suskind, it is not a stretch to view this Treasury Secretary as among the worst to be Treasury Secretary in the history of the United States.

It is nothing short of alarming that a book of more than 300 pages revealing the thoughts of O'Neill when he was Treasury Secretary does not once address the topic of government spending. Indeed, the entire book contains the term federal spending just once. Yet through out the book on page after page, we are harangued about O'Neill's quite legitimate concerns of a growing deficit. But his solution is to battle Bush and advise against any tax cuts without ever mentioning, or even acknowledging, that there is indeed a second part to the equation, specifically spending cuts. Not once!

For O'Neill there is only one solution to growing budget deficits, more taxes. All government expenditures are simply assumed as a given. For a Treasury Secretary who prides himself on thinking out of the box and finding solutions to problems big and small, it is remarkable that he doesn't find even one dollar worth of government expenditures that should be eliminated.

Like O'Neill's curiosity about a president who shows no engagement, asks
no questions and seemingly doesn't get it, one must ask about O'Neill,
Does the man have a clue?

He simply doesn't engage, ask questions or seemingly care about government spending.

It is because of this that O'Neill has to be viewed as nothing more than a spend and tax big government advocate.

So where did O'Neill focus his time, while Treasury Secretary if not on spending cuts? On attempting to design regulations that limit carbon dioxide emissions! On a trip to Africa with rock star Bono, where he determines water wells are the answer.

Yes, the Treasury Secretary based on a murmur from Bush, helped the Environmental Protection Agency's chief Christine Whitman design a carbon dioxide policy that everyone else in the Administration including the President seemed to ignore. The plan was never implemented.

From there O�Neill's next big stand took place during his tour of Africa, where seemingly entirely missing the oppressive, socialistic nature of many of the African governments as a major cause of their poor economic situation, he calls for United States support in building water wells in parts of Africa. His call for water wells gained as much support as his carbon dioxide initiative. Zero.

In the book, we learn that O'Neill views Vice-president Dick Cheney as a significant influence in the Bush Administration. At one point, which can only be viewed as hilarious, O'Neill attempts to mimic the manner in which Cheney holds meetings, of course, with none of the success that Cheney has when he holds meetings.

In its proper context, this book must be viewed as a major embarrassment not only for the president but for O'Neill himself.

Indeed, while O'Neill trumpets his independence and forthrightness, we know through the book that O'Neill recognizes early on that there was no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. On this major issue though, the bumbler decided to go with the flow and instead of voicing his concerns publicly, he decided to take a tour of Africa with Bono.

Ron Suskind's book, thus, does a tremendous service in providing a glimpse into just exactly how some major players in this empire operate, with little that can be said positively about them in terms of integrity, principles or deep understanding.

The Truth About Ronald Reagan And Its Importance In Today's World

Ronald Reagan is dead. In coming days, he will be eulogized by the media,by assorted other pundints and by politicians alike as a great president. In reality, I believe the invasion of Grenada, during Ronald Reagan's watch, put the United States back on its feet as a military adventurer. In addition, Ronald Reagan as a champion of free markets and free enterprise is largely a myth. Few see things this way today and few saw them as such during Reagan's presidency. Only Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) in a journal article, The Reagan Phenomenon, was able to see through the actor's polished
style to the true consequences of Reagan the presidency.

As best as I can determine, the Rothbard journal article was written sometime in the mid-1980's.The article is quite remarkable, in that Rothbard was able to see, back then, many of the trends in government that currently dominate today.

Rothbard starts by warning that:

The presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan has been a disaster for libertarianism in the United States,and might yet prove to be catastrophic for the human race.

He then identifies the contradictions in the Conservative Movement of modern times:

The Conservative Movement of modern times has had three basic, and
mutually contradictory, tenets: (1) 'Getting Big Government Off Our Backs'by rolling back statism and establishing a free market economy; (2) crushing civil liberties whenever crime, 'national security', or 'morality' are threatened, i.e. whenever civil liberties become important; and (3) seeking an all-out political and military confrontation with 'atheistic world Communism'

Certainly in this day and age of the Patriot Act and "material witnesses" being held without basic rights, Rothbard's point regarding the contradictory nature of "Getting Big Government Off Our Backs" and the crushing of civil liberties in the name of "National Security," should be more obvious than ever. Yet Rothbard was able to see this trend developing in the Reagan Administrations more than a decade ago.

The all-out political and military confrontation Rothbard wrote about in his article was, back then, chiefly about the Soviet Union. But seeking "all-out political and military confrontation" has not been eliminated as a characteristic of the modern day conservative movement, it has merely been replaced with confrontation in the Middle East.

Rothbard also wouldn't be surprised by George Bush's ties to the religious right and Bush's declaration that it is beacause of "God's will" that we are occupiers in the Middle East. He saw it in Reagan and wrote:

For conservatives, the State as Theocrat and Moral Enforcer and the State
as Mass Murderer have always taken precedence over the feeble goals of freedom and free markets.

Following the disaster in Vietnam, United States citizens were, in general,not in favor of United States military adventures in foreign lands. The public had had it with war. Ronald Reagan changed this with the invasion of Grenada. It is my contention that Reagan's invasion of Grenada was the first step in United States post-Vietnam military adventures. It was an important step and Reagan started it all. It was the taste of victory against the tiny island of Grenada that set the stage for the invasion of Panama, Iraq War I and the current occupation of Iraq. Reagan's adventure into Grenada and its quick victory wiped out the hesitation to go to war that the Vietnam experience engendered in the masses.

Rothbard explained this desire for quick victory:

Conservatives know that the average Americano, while scarcely an enthusiast for civil liberties, doesn't like the FBI (or still more, the Internal
Revenue Service) snooping in his private papers, and doesn't like the idea of government busily stamping out sin in his backyard. And while the average American cheered the U.S. invasion of Grenada to the rafters, righteously enjoying the sight of the U.S.clobbering a tiny island devoid of even a regular army, he has quite a different view of getting bogged down in some hellhole in a perpetual and losing war, or in being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.The average American, in short, possesses that "complex of vaunting and fear" that Garet Garrett noted as the hallmark of citizens of Empire. On the one hand, emotional identification with 'your' nation-State,and a desire for it to bully and dominate the entire world. On the other, hysterical panic at the machinations of some satanic Enemy or other, an Enemy who is monolithic, omnicompetent and malevolent, and who can only
be faced down with continuing shows of force, the only thing which he can 'understand'. To the extent that he is non-interventionist, the American is
interested not in justice, but in fear of stalemate, fear of loss of face, fear of
not being able to show that his nation is the best and biggest by winning a relatively quick victory.

Rothbard also wouldn't be surprised by the problems the United States is having in Iraq, back then he wrote of the United States experience in Lebanon:

And so the U.S. sends the Marines, like a bull in a china shop, into Lebanon,without knowing or caring about any of the dozens of ethnic and religious
groups that have been there, and have been hating and battling each other (often with good reason) for literally hundreds of years. We land there, and all of a sudden there are these pesky folk with rifles, calling themselves Druze, or Shiites, or Sunnis. Bunch of Arabs, undoubtedly all tools of Moscow. And so when the U.S. Embassy or military headquarters is car-bombed, the U.S. comes to the conclusion that whoever did it are "pro-Iran Shiites". Not being able to find the people responsible, the U.S. engages in a Nazi-like spiral of ascribing collective guilt. If these are "pro-Iran Shiites", it must mean that the Iranian government is behind the bombings...

On the domestic front, Rothbard explains how Reagan sold out even before he was elected:

The Reagan Revolution, in contrast, sold out before it even began. The tip-off came at the Republican convention of 1980 when Reagan surrendered to the Liberal Republican enemy after having defeated them decisively for the nomination. It was not just making the defeated George Bush Vice-President; that much of a concession to party unity is traditional in American politics and usually means little. For Reagan also summarily got rid of almost all of his hard-core ideological advisers, and let back in to run the campaign, and then his Administration, the very pragmatists and Trilateral Commission adherents he had previously fought strongly against.

The Reagan sell-out was the most thorough and complete on 'Plank One'- the free-market part - of the conservative triad. Understandably: since conservatives don't really care about the free-market as they care about compulsory morality and especially war with Communism. The sell-out on the free-market is massive and enormous. A quick rundown will suffice. Reaganomics, as enunciated by Reagan himself before the convention and by conservatives generally, promised the following programme: a sharp cut in the federal budget, a drastic cut in income taxes, a balanced budget by 1984, deregulation of the economy, and return to a gold standard. Reagan has managed to convince both conservatives and liberals, and the American
public, that he did accomplish the first and second points of this list... Conservatives bought this myth because they wanted to see Reagan accomplish what he had said he would; liberals were happy to adopt it so that they could wail about how Reagan was causing untold misery and starvation by his drastic cuts. Actually, the budget was never cut; it has always skyrocketed under Reagan. Reagan is by far the biggest spender in American history. He is also the biggest taxer. Taxes were never cut. The piddling and. much publicised income tax cut was always, from the very
beginning, more than compensated by the programmed Social Security tax increases, add by 'bracket creep', that sinister system by which the federal government prints more money, thereby causing inflation, and also thereby wafting everyone into a higher tax bracket, whereupon the government completes the one-two punch by taxing away a greater proportion of his income.

Reagan was of course the biggest spender in American history until George W. Bush. It should be instructive that Bush claims to model his presidency, not based on that of his father, George H. W. Bush, but on that of Reagan. Bush is doing nothing but traveling further down the path of war, the stomping on civil liberties,theocracy and huge government spending that were the essence of the Reagan presidency. Indeed, it is helpful in understanding the complete picture to think of the current Bush
Administration as nothing more than the Reagan Administration on steroids.

Rothbard concluded his article this way:

Meanwhile what we have to worry about is a question far more serious than the key to the puzzling Reagan personality. Not only as libertarians, but still
more as human beings and members of the human race, we have to ask ourselves the question: Is There Life After Reagan? The jury is still out on that one.

Indeed, the jury still remains out on this question. While the public in general will this week, on news of Reagan's death, hail him as a great leader, the consequences of the trends he set: war, huge government spending etc. are impacting citizens of the world today. Great inflation is ahead. The United States military adventure is a mess. And while George Bush, the man who has unhesitatingly embraced and expanded Reagan's big government spending and military adventuresome ways, could be booted from office in November, he is likely be replaced by John Kerry,who has to-date raised no serious concerns about the encroachment of government in private lives in the name of "National Security," and whose solution to the Iraq occupancy is to bring in the United Nations to help with our interfering in Arab affairs.

Murray Rothbard saw the problem more than a decade ago, will the general public see it now, when it is breathing down their neck? Ronald Reagan is dead but his policies continue on. It would be too much to ask of the general public to recognize Reagan as the spark plug of the current mess. One can only hope that they at least recognize the mess itself.