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Who’s In Charge of the White House? (Hint: It ain’t Bush)
Special Guest: Barbara Comstock, Former Spokesperson for the Justice Department
Have you ever had a boss that you knew just wasn’t competent to do his job?
You know the type: he’s been promoted well beyond his ability. Maybe he’s the prior boss’s son. And he does his best to talk a good game. (In fact, you tell him what to say.) But you know that at the end of the day, you have to do both his job and yours while working damned hard to make him look good. And he does his best not to let outsiders know how completely bewildered he is at his job. You pray — hard — that he won’t be faced with a tough decision and screw it up.

Welcome to the Dubya Bush Administration! Your President, Prince George, definitely enjoys the trappings of power. Like any excitable twelve-year-old boy, he loves to put on a flight suit, take a secret trip to Iraq, sit at the big table with the Cabinet people, and read important speeches written for him in front of the WHOLE CONGRESS. (Yay!) Like any spoiled rich kid, he doesn’t worry about the cost of things: he’s gonna send Americans back to the Moon (and Mars too!)
But when danger comes…when the bad guys kill 3,000 Americans, he’s lost. He continues to read to little children…and then eventually hides under a desk in his private airplane for eight long hours while Americans wonder when…and if..their Prince will emerge.
Bush doesn’t make decisions. He leaves that to Karl and Dick. And they make decisions based on the only two things that matter in the Bush Administration: politics and payback.
Long before the revelations of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil in The Price of Loyalty by Pulitzer-prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, THE INSIDE SCOOP reported who really holds the power in the White House: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Long before The Price of Loyalty, we reported here on the Bush Administration’s plan long before 9/11 to divvy up the oil fields of Iraq.
And now O’Neil has confirmed it, with all the authority of the ultimate insider. Whether or not you saw his explosive revelations on 60 minutes or read this best-seller, you will definitely want to tune in January 18, 2004 at 8 pm Eastern to get THE INSIDE SCOOP on who’s really in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
My guest will be conservative lobbyist Barbara Comstock. Barbara Comstock was formerly chief spokesperson and communications strategist for Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department, as well as Director of Research and Strategic Planning for the Republican National Committee for the 2000 Bush Campaign.
Needless to say, her views were quite different from O’Neil’s, and we had a lively debate on Paul O’Neil’s insights into the inner workings of the Bush Administration.