No, it is you that does not get it. Bush and his policieas drove Powell and Whitman out and he got rid of O'Neil. Bush did not allow these three to do what was best but what he wanted. The problem is Bush had no idea what he was doing. Bush has one and only one skill- politics. That has brought us the Katrina response, Iraq War, the deficit, the trade deficit and the loss of American Jobs and the lack of border security for starters.

BULL! PROVE IT! No proof...? Then find something else to whina about.

The results prove Bush does not know what he is doing. As for O'neil Bush forced him out. That has been talked about in the press. Powell was in constant conflict with the Sec Def and others in DoD. His advise was ignored, he has recently stated we went to Itaq with too few troops and said his support of the Bush reasons for going to war and his 5 Feb 2002 UN speech was an error that he regrets. Whittman was unable to do her job given the Bush attitude to the environment. He prevented her from doing her job. That also has been the subject of many articles. See a SMALL sample below:


The Tragedy of Colin Powell
How the Bush presidency destroyed him.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004, at 9:56 AM PT

What becomes a legend most? Not this

What becomes a legend most? Not this
Is Colin Powell melting down?

It's hard to come up with another explanation for his jaw-dropping behavior last week before the House International Relations Committee. There he sat, recounting for the umpety-umpth time why, back in February 2003, he believed the pessimistic estimates about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I went and lived at the CIA for about four days," he began, "to make sure that nothing was—" Suddenly, he stopped and glared at a Democratic committee staffer who was smirking and shaking his head. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man back there?" Powell grumbled. "Are you part of the proceedings?"

Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, objected, "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."

Continue Article

Powell muttered back, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you, giving editorial comment by head shakes."

Oh, my.

Here is a man who faced hardships in the Bronx as a kid, bullets in Vietnam as a soldier, and bureaucratic bullets through four administrations in Washington, a man who rose to the ranks of Army general, national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state, a man who thought seriously about running for president—and he gets bent out of shape by some snarky House staffer?

Powell's outburst is a textbook sign of overwhelming stress. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Then again, he's also been having a bad three years.

As George Bush's first term nears its end, Powell's tenure as top diplomat is approaching its nadir. On the high-profile issues of the day, he seems to have almost no influence within the administration. And his fateful briefing one year ago before the U.N. Security Council—where he attached his personal credibility to claims of Iraqi WMD—has destroyed his once-considerable standing with the Democrats, not to mention our European allies, most of the United Nations, and the media.

At times, Powell has taken his fate with resigned humor. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last year of a diplomatic soiree that Powell attended on the eve of war, at which a foreign diplomat recited a news account that Bush was sleeping like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, "I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

At other times, though, Powell must be frustrated beyond measure. One can imagine the scoldings he takes from liberal friends for playing "good soldier" in an administration that's treated him so shabbily and that's rejected his advice so brazenly. That senseless dressing-down of the committee staffer—a tantrum that no one with real power would ever indulge in—can best be seen as a rare public venting of Powell's maddened mood.

The decline of Powell's fortunes is a tragic tale of politics: so much ambition derailed, so much accomplishment nullified.

From the start of this presidency, and to a degree that no one would have predicted when he stepped into Foggy Bottom with so much pride and energy, Powell has found himself almost consistently muzzled, outflanked, and humiliated by the true powers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Bureaucratic battles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon have been a feature of many presidencies, but Powell has suffered the additional—and nearly unprecedented—indignity of swatting off continuous rear-guard assaults from his own undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an aggressive hard-liner who was installed at State by Cheney* for the purpose of diverting and exhausting the multilateralists.)

One of Powell's first acts as secretary of state was to tell a reporter that the Bush administration would pick up where Bill Clinton left off in negotiations with North Korea—only to be told by Cheney that it would do no such thing. He had to retract his statement. For the next nine months, he disappeared so definitively that Time magazine asked, on its cover of Sept. 10, 2001, "Where Is Colin Powell?"

The events and aftermath of 9/11 put Powell still farther on the sidelines. He scored something of a victory a year later, when Bush decided, over the opposition of Cheney and Rumsfeld, to take his case for war against Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly. But Powell's attempts to resolve the crisis diplomatically ended in failure.

Once the invasion got under way, the principles of warfare that he'd enunciated as a general—the need to apply overwhelming force on the battlefield (which, during the last Gulf War, was dubbed the "Powell Doctrine")—were harshly rejected (and, in this case, rightly so—Rumsfeld's plan to invade with lighter, more agile forces was a stunning success, at least in the battlefield phase of the war). Powell's objections to Ariel Sharon's departure from the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" were overridden by a White House where Eliot Abrams had been put in charge of Middle East policy. Powell's statements on the Middle East came to be so widely ignored—because no one saw them as reflecting U.S. policy—that Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to the region when he wanted to send a message that would be taken seriously. When Bush dispatched an emissary to Western Europe after the war to lobby for Iraqi debt-cancellation and make overtures for renewing alliances, he picked not Powell but James Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and his father's secretary of state.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk-assessment firm, notes that Powell has scored significant policy achievements on China, Georgia, and the India-Pakistan dispute. But these are issues over which neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld has much at stake—politically, ideologically, or financially.

There have also been occasions, on higher-profile topics, when Powell has broken through the barricades and advanced his positions. He (and Condi Rice) persuaded Bush, over Rumsfeld's opposition, to implement the U.S.-Russian accord reducing strategic missiles. However, he couldn't stop the president from pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty.

Last September, Powell met with President Bush in the Oval Office to make the case for presenting a new U.N. resolution on the occupation of Iraq—and to announce that the Joint Chiefs agreed with him. This was a daring move: Rumsfeld opposed going back to the United Nations; Powell, the retired general, had gone around him for support. Even here, though, Powell's triumph was partial, at best. Bush went back to the United Nations, but the resulting resolution did not call for internationalizing political power in Iraq to anywhere near the degree that Powell favored.

Similarly, Powell has had a few successes at getting Bush to participate in negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons program. (Cheney and Rumsfeld oppose even sitting down for talks.) Yet Bush has declined to adopt any position on what an acceptable accord, short of North Korea's unilateral disarmament, might be. More than a year into this perilous drama, the fundamentals of U.S. policy haven't changed at all.

Powell has also won the occasional battle—or, more accurately, has been on the winning side—when his position converges with Bush's vital political interests. For instance, against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Bush will probably turn over at least some political control in Iraq to the United Nations. He will do so not because Powell has advised such a course, but because the presidential election is coming up and Bush needs to show voters that he has an exit strategy and that American soldiers will not be dying in Baghdad and Fallujah indefinitely.

If there is a second Bush term, Powell will almost certainly not be in it. News stories have reported that he'll step down. He has stopped short of quitting already not just because he's a good soldier, but because that's not what ambitious Cabinet officers do in American politics. Those who resign in protest usually write themselves out of power for all time. They are unlikely to be hired even after the opposition party resumes the Executive Office because they're seen as loose cannons.

Powell, who at one point might have been an attractive presidential candidate for either party, has fallen into a double-damned trap. He can't quit for reasons cited above; yet his often-abject loyalty to Bush, especially on the Iraq question, makes him an unseemly candidate for a future Democratic administration.

He seems to have launched a rehabilitation campaign, to escape this dreaded state. Last month, after David Kay resigned as the CIA's chief weapons inspector and proclaimed that Iraq probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction after all, Powell told a reporter that he might not have favored going to war if he'd known there were no WMD a year ago. He almost instantly retracted his words, as all internal critics of Bush policies seem to do.

Powell's best option, after January, may be to abandon his ambitions for further public office, nab a lucrative job in the private sector, and write the most outrageous kiss-and-tell political memoir that the world has ever seen.

Correction, Feb. 19, 2004: The piece originally identified John Bolton as the No. 2 in the State Department. In fact, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary, is the department's No. 2. Bolton is one of six under secretaries. Return to the corrected sentence.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.
Photograph of Colin Powell by Yuri Gripas/Reuters.

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Published on Thursday, April 22, 2004 by the Boston Globe
It's Time for us to Quit on Powell
by Ellen Goodman


A WHILE BACK, a friend of mine took a new job that had all sorts of opportunities and risks. So along with her goals, she wrote a list of 10 things she would never do to keep the job. When she'd done five of them, she quit.

I've been thinking of her as the next chapter in the Colin Powell biography unfolds. In his new book, Bob Woodward writes, to no one's surprise, that Powell was reluctant to go to war. He writes, to much more surprise, that the secretary of state was out of the loop when the actual decision was made.

I don't know where or what "the loop" is, but now Powell is fighting back to prove that he was in it. "My support was willing and it was complete," he told the Associated Press, "no matter how others might try to impose their policy wishes on my body."

Did Powell ever make that list of 10 things he would never do as secretary of state? Maybe not. Maybe, like a good soldier, he just signed up for the tour of duty. As he told Sean Hannity, "I don't quit on long patrols."

But haven't those of us who long respected this general, this statesman, finally maxed out the list of things we thought he'd never do?

For many of us, Colin Powell was a reassuring -- the reassuring figure -- in the Bush administration. It wasn't his politics so much as his character. He was admired as trustworthy. He was, from the get-go, a popular choice for secretary of state even, or especially, among those who were uncertain about the president. Maybe President Bush could be called a cowboy, but Powell was a sober general. Maybe Vice President Cheney had a "fever" for regime change, but Powell was a cooler head. Maybe others would designate Iraq as a "cake walk" but Powell knew that after you entered Baghdad, the "Pottery Barn rules" took over: You break it, it's yours.

If the administration had its eye on glory, Powell had his on dusty boots on the ground. If they saw the world in black and white, he saw the world in greater complexity.

I was glad that he was there. And I was wrong. If anything, Colin Powell provided a false reassurance to those who thought to ourselves, "Well, if he says so . . . maybe."

Entries one, two, three, four on my "not to do" list come under the date of Feb. 5, 2003, when Powell took his and our credibility to the UN Security Council and offered up a PowerPoint presentation that would make Microsoft proud. He made a compelling case of "Iraq Failing to Disarm." With quotes and highlights and photos, the slides even included a picture of the now-infamous aluminum tubes linked to the fanciful nuclear weapons programs. Disarmament for dummies.

Even if the attempt to get the UN on board was right, those power points -- weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda -- were largely wrong. If he was misled, so did he mislead. If "The Man," as Cheney calls the president, cannot admit mistakes, the secretary of state has been only marginally more open.

Washington insiders have called the Powell-Bush relationship a "soap opera." Can a moderate survive in a hawkish Cabinet? For how long? It is similar to questions asked in many workplaces: When does disagreement require a divorce? When do you get out? When do you speak out? Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke faced the cold shoulder as well as warm book sales.

But I suspect that many dissenters in a company or an administration stay on not just out of loyalty but out of the hope they can still make a difference. And out of the belief that things would be worse without them.

In the Vietnam War, some of the more dovish bureaucrats were reluctant to leave their seats to the hawks. They measured their effect in the changes they could still make, in the voices that would still be heard. Sometimes the successes became so tiny it was hard to tell them from failure.

I don't know how Powell calculates his victories, whether he is loyal to the president or the troops, whether he believes in the policy or in his ability to change it. He may well feel it's his burden to put together the broken Iraq.

But any public illusion that he makes a difference has been shattered. That's the end to the soap opera. And if Powell won't quit on Bush, isn't it long past time to quit on Powell?

© Copyright 2004 The Boston Globe

ERRICK Z. JACKSON
Educating George Bush

By Derrick Z. Jackson | November 19, 2004

THE OPTIMIST can faintly hope that Margaret Spellings does not join the ghost of Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman was Bush's choice in his first term to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Bush said Whitman "is a chief executive who understands the importance of a clean and healthy environment and will ensure that environmental regulations are based on sound science."
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Bush asked Whitman to be caretaker of an agency probusiness Republicans wished to eviscerate. As she put a prochoice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control face on environmental policy, Vice President Dick Cheney's far more powerful secret energy task force champed at the drill bit. Sound science did not last even two months.

Despite a memo in which Whitman told Bush, "We need to appear engaged" on global warming, Bush reversed his campaign pledge to cap carbon dioxide emissions and rejected the Kyoto global warming treaty. In 2002, the EPA reported that human activities were responsible for global warming. Bush trashed the news with sarcasm, saying, "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy."

The White House would go on to the ultimate step of deleting or altering parts of EPA reports that said industrial pollution and car exhaust play an undeniable role in global warming. Whitman quit quietly and loyally in the summer of 2003, saying only, "I've never been frustrated with the president's view."

Now, in a second administration where nominees are being rewarded for seamless, if not stifling, loyalty, Bush has nominated Spellings, an adviser on domestic policy who goes back to his days as Texas governor, to be the new education secretary.

She starts off with her own face of moderation, provided by the praise from the top Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy said Spellings is "a capable, principled leader who has the ear of the president and has earned strong, bipartisan respect in Congress."

If the tenure of Spellings is to mean anything, she must bend the ear of the president in the way teachers used to do to inattentive students. With Bush in office another four years, that means four more years of No Child Left Behind. Bush established it to reform America's public schools, saying he wanted to eliminate the soft bigotry of low expectations. The program has thus far been a sham of forcing educators to teach to tests while denying schools any meaningful resources to address learning gaps or escape failing schools.

As Bush has spent more than $1 trillion on tax cuts and two wars, funding for No Child Left Behind has been horribly paltry. Bush brags that he has budgeted $13.3 billion for the program. But the gap between what Bush asked for and what Congress can spend is estimated between $7 billion and $10 billion. One result is that Chicago last year allowed only 1,100 transfers among the 19,000 students who wanted to flee failing schools. The Chicago schools projected only 457 transfers this year among more than 270,000 students who would be eligible to transfer.

In a report this fall by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, teachers in Fresno, Calif., and Richmond, Va., said that they did not mind being held "accountable," but accountability without resources results in too high a level of turnover of both teachers and principals. Another well-known problem is how schools are having to drop everything from gym to Shakespeare to teach to tests. Such pressures are making legislators in many states, even in Utah where Bush just won 71 percent of the vote, to make noise about dropping out of the program.

Bush said in nominating Spellings that "we will continue to stand behind our nation's teachers." But he did not offer a grand defense of teachers after his outgoing education secretary, Rod Paige, labeled the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the United States, a "terrorist organization." When it came to a report on global warming from the EPA, Bush pooh-pooh the "bureaucracy." In No Child Left Behind, Bush's new bureaucracy has made teachers the scapegoat, asking them to jump over new hurdles on track shoes with the soles falling off.

In nominating Spellings, Bush said: "The stakes are too high to tolerate failure." When it was Spellings's turn to speak, she said to Bush: "I share your passion for education and your commitment to seeing that each and every child has the skills and qualities necessary to realize the American dream."

The only way the dream will be realized is if Spellings does something increasingly impossible in the Bush administration. She will have to show him a passion for education that drastically changes his commitment. As it is now, No Child Left Behind is a stake in the heart of public education guaranteeing failure. She will have to risk being a Christine Todd Whitman. She will have to risk becoming a ghost.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.



The Smearing Of O'Neil Begins
Treasury Wants Investigation Into 'Secret' Documents
O'Neill Denies Charge Over Book Documents
By Martin Crutsinger
Associated Press
1-13-4


WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, embroiled in a dispute with the White House over his harsh criticism of President Bush's leadership style, denied Tuesday that he used classified documents for his new book.

Reacting to an announcement by the Treasury Department that it was launching an inspector general's investigation into how an agency document stamped "secret" wound up being used in his interview Sunday night on the CBS program "60" minutes, O'Neill said, "The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all."

Interviewed on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, O'Neill said he had asked the Treasury Department's chief legal counsel "to have the documents that are OK for me to have" for use in the book entitled, "The Price of Loyalty."

Asked if he thought the internal Treasury probe was a get-even move by the administration, O'Neill replied, "I don't think so. If I were secretary of the treasury and these circumstances occurred, I would have asked the inspector general to look into it." But O'Neill also said he thinks the questions could have been more readily answered if top Treasury officials had talked to the agency's legal counsel.

"I'm surprised that he didn't call the chief legal counsel," O'Neill said of his successor, Treasury Secretary John Snow.

O'Neill said a cover page for the documents might have suggested they were classified material but said that the legal counsel's office "ssent me a couple CDs, which I never opened." He said he gave them to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the book's author.

"I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said Tuesday, predicting the Treasury investigation would show that the Treasury employees who collected the materials for him had followed the law.

O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, is quoted in the book as saying the president was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq from the start of his administration.

O'Neill also said Tuesday said he did not mean to imply that the administration was wrong to begin contingency planning for a regime change in Iraq but that he was surprised that it was at the top of the agenda at the first Cabinet meeting.

O'Neill in the book also contends the administration's decision-making process was often chaotic and Bush Cabinet meetings made the president look "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

O'Neill told the "Today" show he was guilty of using some "vivid" language during his hundreds of hours of interviews with Suskind for the book. "If I could take it back, I would take it back," he said of the blind man quote.

Bush made a strong defense of his Iraq policy on Monday, while some of the Democratic presidential candidates weighed in, saying Bush had misled the American public.

On the nationally broadcast interview Tuesday, O'Neill said, "It was not my intention to be personally critical of the president of anybody else," but to cooperate with Suskind "on a chronicle of 23 months" in government.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark said O'Neill "confirms my worst suspicions about this administration," while Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said, O'Neill showed that the American people "have been misled by this."

All the furor has boosted interest in the book, which was going on sale Tuesday in bookstores nationwide.

O'Neill was the principal source for the book, written by Suskind, who relied not only on extensive interviews with O'Neill but also on 19,000 documents that the former secretary provided him.

For that reason, Suskind said he and O'Neill were striving through the book to provide readers' with as much information as possible about the inner workings of the Bush White House so they could draw their own conclusions.

Now, however, Treasury Department Inspector General Jeffrey Rush has been asked to investigate the use of a document on CBS.

Suskind in the "60 Minutes" interview referred to discussions in the early days of the administration and said, "There are memos. One of them, marked secret, says `Plan for post-Saddam Iraq.'"

CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said CBS simply "showed a cover sheet that alluded to" a secret document but did not show any actual secret documents during the telecast.

In Mexico on Monday to attend a Summit of the Americas meeting, Bush offered a forceful defense of his decision to go to war against Iraq, saying, "the decision I made is the right one for America" and for the world.

Asked specifically whether O'Neill was correct in saying that planning for the war had begun far ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush said that when he had become president he had inherited a policy of "regime change" from former President Clinton and had decided to adopt it as his own.

Republican supporters of Bush aimed their fire at O'Neill, contending that his comments showed the grudge he held against Bush for the president's decision to fire him for fighting against a new round of tax cuts.

"Mr. O'Neill is now as bitter as he was ineffective when he served as treasury secretary," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio.

However, O'Neill was defended by Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration and later wrote a controversial book about the experience.

"Cabinet members should be loyal to a president, but they have a larger loyalty to the public," said Reich.

From Associated Press:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&e=5&u=/ap/
20040113/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/bush_o_neill

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=14517&mode=nested&order=0




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The results prove Bush does not know what he is doing. As for O'neil Bush forced him out. That has been talked about in the press. Powell was in constant conflict with the Sec Def and others in DoD. His advise was ignored, he has recently stated we went to Iraq with too few troops and said his support of the Bush reasons for going to war and his 5 Feb 2002 UN speech was an error that he regrets. Whittman was unable to do her job given the Bush attitude to the environment. He prevented her from doing her job. That also has been the subject of many articles. See a SMALL sample below:

Unless you can show me where Colin Powell "himself" said GW forced him out, you have NO proof of that. Someones opinion or innuendo does NOT constitute proof! Sorry. And just for the record....Bush knowing what he's doing has nothing to do with Powell resigning unless you can show that proof. And if you'd bother to look at what I posted before, I "already" said Bush asked for O'Neil's resignation! That's equal to being forced out, just as an FYI...

And I can see we're back to our old tricks. This thread was about FEMA not Powell or O'Neil or anyone else.

You can provide proof up the ass to drmiler. He just dismisses it and ask for more proof. Yet, he never provides anything except Newmax, FOX New, and other rightie sitey news. No hearings testimony. No investigated journal articles. Nothing. But, just asks for more proof. He wouldn't recognize proof if it hit him in the head. He just dismisses it. Blind jingo junkie.

You can provide proof up the ass to drmiler. He just dismisses it and ask for more proof. Yet, he never provides anything except Newmax, FOX New, and other rightie sitey news. No hearings testimony. No investigated journal articles. Nothing. But, just asks for more proof. He wouldn't recognize proof if it hit him in the head. He just dismisses it. Blind jingo junkie.

Watch your mouth and stay out of our conversation you ignorant liberal moon-bat!

drmiler

Proof has NO place with you. You are the type of fool that just ignores everything that does not reflect well on Saint George!

Proof has NO place with you. You are the type of fool that just ignores everything that does not reflect well on Saint George!

Just as you ignore anything that dismisses your "facts" about Bush?

Why is it when a poll shows less than 15% percent blame Bush for the Hurricane, you dismiss the poll. But when another poll shows something that goes with your opinion about Bush, you claim it's the "truth"?

The facts I sight are facts. Thay are only dismissed by the fools that support the failures of this president. About 1/3 of Americans support Bush and his policies. A lot of people screwed up in November 2004!

The facts I sight are facts. Thay are only dismissed by the fools that support the failures of this president. About 1/3 of Americans support Bush and his policies. A lot of people screwed up in November 2004!

Col, we have dismissed your "facts" many times. Interesting that you don't seem to remember.

Only 1/3 of 1000 Americans support Bush. Why is it a media poll is not reliable when it shows people don't blame Bush for Katrina, but anything else you believe it?

drmiler Proof has NO place with you. You are the type of fool that just ignores everything that does not reflect well on Saint George!

Could you please show me where you provided proof?

Could you please show me where you provided proof?

Like a broken record....................

Could you please show me where you provided proof? Like a broken record....................

Like I said.....STAY OUT OF IT!!!! The question was not directed at you was it? What is the col to cowardly to answer his own questions? Have to hide behind a woman's skirt, do we?

Could you please show me where you provided proof? Like a broken record....................

Have you considered how foolish this makes you look? Just for clarification all I asked for was for col to point something out. So who here is really the broken record? Not moi!

Could you please show me where you provided proof?

They never provide proof, just media polls. As you can see how they react when you ask for proof, they insult. Typical.