http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119040316144335515.html

if you are unable to link/read this peggy attack on alan, then,
uh....the wsj is rumored to be considering making it all free when
that not necessarily nicey-nice new owner takes-over down the road
near whar the oak, which was split by lightnin real good in
'87...,or....:

copyrighted dow jones 2007

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Now He Tells Us
By PEGGY NOONAN
September 22, 2007; Page W10

There is the story about a puffed-up political figure, or maybe it was
a movie star, who came out with a memoir and began the requisite tour.
A reporter cornered him at a cocktail party: "Did you write this book
yourself?"

"Write it?" the man said. "I didn't even read it."

This crossed my mind while reading Alan Greenspan's memoir, in which
the war for Iraq was all about oil, though the wise have long been
prohibited from sharing this insight with the common folk. In
interviews, Mr. Greenspan now corrects that: He meant the war seemed
to him, though he cannot claim it did to others in power, driven
primarily by American dependence on foreign energy.

In the book he fiercely opposes the Bush tax cuts. He feared the
budget surpluses enjoyed in 2000 would be transformed into long-term
deficits. He worried that entitlement spending would leave "a very
large hole in future budgets." Not facing this was "a failure." He
disdains the Great Pork Spree of the '00s. The unifying idea that
governed Bush White House economic thinking -- "deficits don't matter"
-- was, simply, wrong. Mr. Greenspan found it a "struggle" to accept
that this is what the Republican Party had come to. Scrambling for
political dominance became the party's great goal. "The reality was
even uglier": They would spend and spend "to add a few more seats to
the Republican majority."

This is all strongly, and clearly, stated.

But when the tax cuts, and the impact of spending, were being debated,
Mr. Greenspan allowed his congressional testimony to be interpreted as
supportive of the Bush plan. And he did this even though he had been
warned in advance by those who'd seen his testimony that it would be
seen as an endorsement of the tax plan.

Indeed his testimony -- airy vaporizing about long-term trends -- was
quickly seized on by the White House and its congressional supporters
as support for their approach. Mr. Greenspan describes himself --
literally, in an aside he seems to find witty -- as "shocked, shocked"
that politics is going on in Washington, and his words are being
twisted.

But he never quite cleared it up, not at the time. He does it now,
with the book, and after the advance. As a writer I am in passionate
support of large advances, but $8.5 million to tell the American
people what he should have told them when his views might have had an
impact?

In the book he seems to brag about how artfully and deliberately
obscure his public statements were, all those orotund stylings marked
by barely penetrable syntax, passive voice and oblique phraseology.
Somehow they seem less amusing in retrospect. Maybe their very
obscurity allowed partisans to twist his words into whatever shape
they wanted. And maybe that was sort of OK with him.

The book has merits -- it is blessedly lucid on how the Fed works and
how Fed-heads think -- but there is within it a great disconnect. I
was thinking about this when I got a note from a former U.S. senator
who groused about "the phenomena of high-level public officials
'bravely speaking out' after they have left office." He scored Mr.
Greenspan as "perfectly free to have spoken out about the need for the
President to veto more spending bills on numerous occasions when he
was testifying in public." My correspondent says Mr. Greenspan's
"total silence" while in office does not exactly qualify as "bravely
speaking out."

The former senator has a point. It can be summed up as: Now you tell
us? It doesn't take courage to speak clearly when no one can hurt you.
It takes guts to be candid when candor can earn powerful enemies.

U.S. government officials owe the people who pay them, and who have
raised them high -- that would be the American taxpayer -- real-time
wisdom. They owe us their best thinking. Sometimes this is
uncomfortable. But that's the price you pay for the car and the honors
and the security detail and the special U.S. Army jet that flies you
home, alone, across the Atlantic, on the day after 9/11.

Mr. Greenspan was reappointed for a three-year term by President
Clinton in 2000. He allowed himself to be painted as a supporter of
the Bush tax cuts in 2001. He was reappointed by President Bush in
2003. Mr. Bush is now deeply unpopular. Mr. Greenspan, retired and
selling a book, has discovered Mr. Bush's deep flaws. The timing is
all so convenient.

One wouldn't suggest a quid pro quo in Mr. Greenspan's testimony and
subsequent reappointment. He had to some degree tangled with
presidents in the past. But it is likely true that Mr. Greenspan would
not have wanted to give the president reasons to hesitate, and it
would also be true to say that Mr. Bush did not want a reason, for Mr.
Greenspan was respected and the markets liked him. Or until this week
when he gave the impression his own personal long-term economic
planning involves keeping bars of gold under the porch with a dog
named Butch -- sorry, I mean highly fungible physical entities
embodying real and symbolic value next to an exuberant canine.

So to suggest a quid pro quo would be vulgar. And in any case who
could say? At that level, the game is played without words or even
winks. It's played through feints, silences, symbols, vague words.
Then a handshake and off we go.

Long ago in a book called "What I Saw at the Revolution," I wrote that
I was dismayed by White House memoirs whose underlying message was,
"If only they'd listened to me, the fools!" I didn't want to do that,
and in my case I couldn't. Sometimes if they'd listened to me they'd
have been wrong indeed. Mr. Greenspan is an "If only they'd listened
to me" man. He should have added, "And they might have if I'd been
clear."

There has been a certain bite in the Bush White House memoirs, as if
they were written by men who felt they'd been badly ragged around and
could finally get back. Mr. Greenspan convincingly -- well, who could
doubt it now? -- asserts that the White House discouraged independent
thinking and instead emphasized "loyalty and staying on message." This
he says is what did in Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who also
argued that deficits matter.

When Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress, before the Iraq war, that
postinvasion troop levels should be "something in the order of several
hundred thousand soldiers," his views were called "outlandish" by
administration officials. He was bureaucratically undercut, and he
limped to retirement. When economic adviser Larry Lindsay told this
newspaper the war would likely cost up to four times what the
administration asserted, he was sacked.

Early and brutal examples were made of those who did not echo the
party line. Perhaps Mr. Greenspan was watching, or rather observing
certain trends.

The deeper story is not that those who've been silenced have often
come forward to speak in harsh terms. The deeper story is that the
Bush White House hurt itself by using muscle to squelch alternative
thinking -- creative thinking, independent judgments -- that would, in
retrospect, have benefited them. Big spending became a scandal. So did
not enough troops, and the financial cost of the war. It was this
tendency that led to the administration's gym-rat reputation, all
muscle and no brains.

RELATED ARTICLES AND BLOGS
Related Articles from the Online Journal
· Greenspan Book Criticizes Bush And Republicans
· Bush Rebuts Greenspan's Critique of Fiscal Policy
· Greenspan's Dismay Extends Both Ways
· After Rove, Strategy Choices Loom
Blog Posts About This Topic
· Peggy Noonan calls Greenspan the weakling (and Bush the bully)
caveatbettor.blogspot.com
· Greenspan speaks out farazharoon.spaces.live.com
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