Looks like another good “60 Minutes” segment is upcoming:
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” according to excerpts Friday from a CBS interview.
O’Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour.
“As I recall it was just a monologue,” he told CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which will broadcast the entire interview Sunday.
In making the blind man analogy, O’Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate.
“There is no discernible connection,” CBS quoted O’Neill as saying. The president’s lack of engagement left his advisers with “little more than hunches about what the president might think,” O’Neil said, according to the program.
Perhaps there wasn’t any connection because Bush didn’t understand what his advisers were talking about–a scary but credible possibility. Either that or he’s so set in his views that he simply doesn’t care what his advisers tell him–which is almost as bad.