Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Paul O'Neill, who gave up a great job playing for the Yankees to become Bush's Secretary of the Treasury (oh... wait... not that Paul O'Neill), has apparently been spending too much time travelling around Africa with Bono (that's actually true, of course) and not enough time... you know... doing good things for the economy. Tim Russert, who has never, in his life, been nice to anyone (although he is more amiable than Chris Matthews, who famously dragged his sons around Berlin so they could find the site of Hitler's bunker and urinate on it...), was particularly mean to the Secretary:

"Here's how one typical exchange went:

Russert: You're not spending the Social Security surplus?

O'Neill: I don't think, Tim, that the American fiscal position, that is to say, surplus or deficit, comes from raising taxes.

Russert: But you're spending the Social Security surplus. The facts are important, Mr. Secretary.

Soon, Russert had O'Neill fumbling for new rationales as to why the deficit had gone up. Now it wasn't congressional spending that had pushed the federal budget into the red. It was the response to 9/11:

Russert: But, Mr. Secretary, the deficit is $165 billion. You're spending the Social Security surplus. And your own figures from the Office of Management and Budget show that nearly 40 percent of the surplus over the next 10 years is being used by the tax cut.

O'Neill: I would say this to you, Tim, we're not...

Russert: Those are your numbers.

O'Neill: We're in a deficit position because of 9/11 and the money that's necessary...

Russert: And not the tax cut?

O'Neill: No. I think we're spending money that is necessary to provide for homeland defense, to provide for additional resources for the Defense Department. I haven't found any Americans who say, "We're spending too much money on the wrong things," and what's happened to us is our revenues have gone down because the economy slowed down, but they will come back and growth will restore the surpluses.

Russert was no gentler when it came to the issue of O'Neill's fitness for office. Russert played a clip from December 2000, just after President-elect Bush had named O'Neill as his Treasury secretary. There, Bush had said: "We must have a steady voice coming out of our administration, someone, should the economy take a downturn, who can calm people's nerves, calm the markets, calm the--you know--those who would speculate in the dollar." Noting that O'Neill had been visiting former Soviet republics during the recent stock market fall, Russert turned Bush's words against O'Neill: "Calm people's nerves. Calm the markets. That's what he wanted you to do. When you're away visiting the Soviet republics, you can't possibly be doing that back home here." O'Neill insisted that communications technology allowed him to stay in touch, then retreated to his mantra about the economy's fundamentals being sound."