Posted on 03/01/2004 9:43:23 PM PST by kattracks
First Lady wannabe Teresa Heinz Kerry had a good friend inside the Bush White House - former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who, after he was fired, wrote a book that painted the president as an ignoramus who was itching to go to war with Iraq.
"I have to mention how proud I am to share this podium today with my friend . . . fellow Pittsburgher, Paul O'Neill," Mrs. Kerry said while delivering the commencement address at Carnegie Mellon University last May.
"Paul is a decisive, intelligent man who speaks his mind, and I have always admired that about him," added the woman whose husband was seeking to depose O'Neill's ex-boss.
The admiration was apparently mutual. O'Neill served with Heinz Kerry on the Heinz Center Board of Trustees from 1996 through 2000, where the two shared a passion for environmental activism.
After he was sacked by Bush in 2002, O'Neill began working on his White House expose, "The Price of Loyalty," which was seized on by Kerry backers when it was released this January.
Much to the delight of the ketchup heiress and her friends, O'Neill said in his book that Bush reminded him of "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and offered documents purporting to show that the White House had a plan to invade Iraq well before the 9/11 attacks.
After O'Neill's revelations hit the fan, Mrs. Kerry defended her old friend in an interview with MSNBC.com.
"Paul is a very honest man, and a brilliant man. He is, in the best sense of the word, a CEO: totally practical and non-ideological," she insisted.
Reacting to O'Neill's claim that he would have softened some of his comments if he'd known they were going to generate so much controversy, Heinz Kerry said, "I would like to talk him and say, ‘Did you really mean all the things you said in the book? Of course you did.'"
Every time I see that costume, I am reminded of Zippy the Pinhead.
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