Former Treasury Sec. Paints Bush as ‘Blind Man’

This just has to be too good to be true:

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 on 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 on 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’Neill said, according to the program.

CBS said much of O’Neill’s criticisms of Bush are included in “The Price of Loyalty,” an upcoming book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.

It appears that what everyone thinks of as Bush loyalty is actually Bush fear. The reason they rarely fire anyone is because they know that this is the kind of thing that will likely come out.