Free Republic

Did reporter Ron Suskind make up the titillating quotes by Andy Card (in which he called Karl Rove "a beast" and said that with Karen Hughes gone "the balance of what has worked up to now for George Bush, is gone, simply gone") that attracted so much attention in the July issue of Esquire? The Bush administration sure wants you to think so. After the article came out, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said Suskind has a "hyperactive imagination" and that his story was "not an accurate representation of this White House." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer added, "We...

Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture. That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms." Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House....

<p>WASHINGTON -- Sensitive national-security information was mistakenly released by the Treasury Department to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, but no criminal statutes were violated, records show.</p> <p>Mr. O'Neill drew on some of the material -- part of a cache of 19,000 documents -- for a memoir released in January that was critical of President Bush. When a document stamped "Secret" was displayed on a CBS "60 Minutes" episode concerning the book, the Treasury Department sought an investigation.</p>

Although I fell in love with Sarah Palin in 2008, she had begun to drive me a just a little bit crazy recently, often so inarticulate that I thought she was trying to make Barack Obama without a teleprompter look like Pericles. All is forgiven. Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president redeemed her. She did the right thing by her country, her party, and by herself. By not running, Palin preserves her status as a power broker in the Republican Party, which could have been diminished by a bad showing in the primaries. She will be big in...

WASHINGTON - Supposedly, this White House has just made a furious attempt to sink a book, "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, which came out Sept. 20. Jay Carney, the White House spinmeister, spoke ill of it. Numerous former White House staffers spoke ill of it. Carney said, "One passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia." Why would a respected writer want to do that? I suspect that the White House is going to be as effective in sinking Suskind as it has been in keeping President Barack Obama's polling...

A pair of years-old anecdotes, recently revisited, show that top economists in the White House and Obama’s cabinet expressed serious doubts about the White House’s emphasis on and approach to green jobs. Three top economic advisers, on at least two occasions, have sounded alarms about that agenda. In October 2010, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then-director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers warned that the oversight of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee programs – one of which financed defunct solar company Solyndra – was too lax, the Los Angeles Times reported [1]: At a White House meeting in late...

You want a quick and easy introduction to media bias? Just look at the reception given to author Ron Suskind when he appeared on NBC's "Today" show recently to promote his new book, "Confidence Men," which is critical of President Obama -- and then compare it to the reception Suskind received in 2004 when he appeared on "Today" to tout another book, "The Price of Loyalty," which was critical of President George W. Bush. Start with the new book. The newsworthy bits in "Confidence Men" are well known: Suskind reports the Obama White House is tough on women, with former...

I've been saying for some time that Barack Obama is the most economically ignorant president since Zachary Taylor, but I increasingly fear I've been doing the general a disservice. It's not just erroneous economics, but sheer ignorance of markets and economics. You see it in periodic comments of the President. Perhaps the most famous came when he said that ATMs and airport ticket kiosks lead to unemployment: “When you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at...

Ron Suskind’s controversial new book, “Confidence Men” reveals how President Barack Obama came to embrace “RomneyCare” as a model of reform.For example, it reveals that in a memo to President Obama concerning potential health care reform options, White House chief health care official Nancy-Ann DeParle, directed Obama’s attention to the only working model for reform in the country: Massachusetts, whose health care overhaul bill passed in 2005 under a brokered deal between then-governor Mitt Romney and the state’s Democratic legislature.” (p. 262) Suskind goes on to demonstrate that President Obama, who previously had not embraced the individual mandate, was...

Friction about the roles of women in the Obama White House grew so intense during the first two years of the presidentÂ’s tenure that he was forced to take steps to reassure senior women on his staff that he valued their presence and their input. At a dinner in November 2009, several senior female aides complained directly to the president that men enjoyed greater access to him and often muscled them out of key policy discussions. Those tensions prompted Obama, urged on by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, to elevate more women into senior White House positions, recognize them more during...

While co-host Ann Curry on Tuesday's NBC "Today" wondered if Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men" was "fact or fiction," on August 5, 2008, then-co-host Meredith Vieira touted Suskind's claim in "Way of the World" that the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war was "worse than Watergate." Speaking of Suskind's latest work on Tuesday, Curry described how Obama administration "top officials are lining up to say they were either misquoted or taken out of context by the author." She then wondered: "Did he get the story right?" In contrast, while Vieira noted the Bush White House labeling Suskind's book at that...

"Talk is circulating about an eye-opening new book on the Obama administration set to come out tomorrow. Confidence Men, by Pulitzer-prize winning author Ron Suskind, suggests that a handful of power-hungry, Wall Street-loving advisers undermined the president's quest for financial reform, according to an early look at the book by New York magazine. To boot, these advisers, including the "insubordinate" Tim Geithner and the "monomaniacal" Larry Summers, were "pretty awful to women," says New York's Adam Moss. A number of women, in contrast, come off as heroes--among them our own Sen. Maria Cantwell."

Top female advisers felt left out by a boy's club in the White House where rampant infighting sabotaged the administration's economic decisions, according to a controversial new book. Sidelined and ignored in the West Wing, some women aides reportedly complained to President Obama about their treatment in 2009. In an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, a female senior aide is quoted as calling the White House a hostile environment for women. Confidence Men: Wall Steet, Washington and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind, is due out in the shops next Tuesday. Former Communications Director Anita Dunn...

A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm....

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including Obama, Geithner and other top officials for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President,"...

A REGISTERED DEMOCRAT'S CREATIVE WRITINGJust A Coincidence The New York Times Publishes Suskind Hit Piece On Same Day They Endorse Kerry?_____________________________________________________________SUSKIND DOESN'T ALWAYS GET HIS FACTS STRAIGHTSuskind Piece In New York Times Largely Based On Anonymous Sources And Second Hand Reports. Mr. SUSKIND: "It's not my analysis. It's the analysis largely of Republicans who cooperated with the – the [New York Times] story. What did they say?" MURRAY: "But no names. No names. Mr. SUSKIND: "Bruce Bartlett – Bruce Bartlett's in the lead of the story." MURRAY: "He's not in the administration." Mr. SUSKIND: "Well, but he talks to a...

Like the discovery of gambling in “Casablanca,” the mainstream media is shocked, shocked! to learn there is chaos and back-stabbing in the Obama White House. The media missed the story for the same reason Capt. Renault missed gambling at Rick’s Cafe: They chose to. A cash kickback did the trick in the film. In real life, the Washington pack turns away from the truth for something less forgivable. Three years after President Obama took office, much of the national press corps remains remarkably uncurious about what has gone wrong inside the land of Hope & Change. Whether still mesmerized by...

A claim in Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President, that the Obama Administration created a hostile workplace for his female advisors was met with denials from current White House Budget Director Jack Lew. “The contention that the President or any of his male appointees would denigrate these women in any way is mistaken. To the contrary, we all had a broad respect for these ladies,” Lew said as he struggled to suppress a titter over his use of the word “broad.” Former head of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer’s complaint,...

As noted here yesterday, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, in a Politico piece, lashed out at Ron Suskind, depicting Suskind's book on bad times in the Obama White House as a "drive-by shooting" of President Obama and his staff. That hardly seemed in the spirit of President Obama's pious call, in his much-touted Tucson memorial speech, for people to speak in a way "that heals, not wounds" . Joe Scarborough called Rattner out on the matter on today's Morning Joe. But Rattner blithely batted away Scarborough's depiction of "drive-by" as harsh and rhetorically inflammatory. View the video here.

"It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that -- that heals, not in a way that wounds." -- President Obama, speech at Tuscon memorial service, January 12, 2011. "The [Suskind] book amounts to a drive-by shooting of a president and his key economic advisers who deserve encomiums, not unfounded second guessing and inaccurate revisionist history." -- Former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, writing at the Politico, October 2, 2011 [emphasis added]. So less than nine months after President Obama pronounces pious words about talking "in a...