Free Republic

Journalist Ron Suskind is one-stop shopping for Bush administration castaways. But what if John DiIulio -- Suskind gave him a platform in Esquire magazine in 2002 to call the administration "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis" -- and Paul O'Neill had been shopping a conservative critique of Bush? Would Suskind have cracked open his notebook? Not likely. Few events excite liberal journalists more than the inevitable defection of an "insider" from a Republican administration, provided that the defector is a liberal who is telling the media what it wants to hear. What interests the Suskinds are not conservative defectors but...

I CAN SEE from the Daily News' Friday editorial ("A Penn professor gets a lesson from Bush") that you are puzzled, dismayed and disappointed by my statements of last Monday concerning the Esquire magazine article. You may not like or accept my reasons, but I will give them. Sixteen months ago, I left the White House after serving the half-year I publicly said I would when I took the job. I stayed just long enough to complete the only task at which I had any special skill, namely "Unlevel Playing Field," a study exploring how government discriminates against grassroots religious...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Politics and re-election concerns rule the White House at the expense of good public policy, says a former aide to President Bush. Not so, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday, dismissing comments from John J. DiIulio as ``baseless and groundless.''DiIulio issued two statements, the first generally standing by his criticism, the second - similar to Fleischer's comment - calling his own allegations ``groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples.''DiIulio, a Democrat who led the White House office of faith-based initiatives until August 2001, said in an interview with Esquire magazine: ``There is no...

Recently William J. Bennett, best-selling "Book of Virtues" author, conservative commentator and Republican leader, admitted publicly that he has a vice: excessive gambling. According to published reports, over the past decade or so the former U.S. education secretary and drug czar bet several million dollars playing slot machines at Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos. When the story broke, Bennett's critics called him a hypocrite, even though he had never spoken out against gambling or denied previous reports that he gambled. Some suggested that, because Bennett was so hard on President Bill Clinton and so outspoken on other controversial issues,...

Maybe it’s because the midterm elections went so very well. Maybe it’s because at the White House, politics is the best policy. Maybe it’s because it’s the reign of Karl Rove. An inside look at how the most powerful presidential adviser in a century does what does so well. On a cool Saturday a few days before Christmas last year, Karl Rove showed up in a festive mood at David Dreyer’s house in suburban Washington, D. C., to trim the tree and have a cup of eggnog. Dreyer is a liberal Democrat, formerly the deputy communications director in the Clinton...

The flap over former Bush White House adviser John DiIulio's cutting criticisms of his former colleagues, followed by his earnest, near-groveling apology — all stemming from a still-to-be-published article in the January issue of Esquire magazine — has obscured another, perhaps more newsworthy aspect of the story.In the piece, a preview of which is available on Esquire's website, DiIulio ridicules the "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House, whom he defined, in a letter to the writer Ron Suskind, as the "staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing...