Suskind wrote the Esquire piece on John DiIulio too

[nostamj]

I didn't realize that Suskind (The Price of Loyalty) was the writer behind the John DiIulio/Esquire piece (which DiIulio almost immediately recanted). The Conosan article is excellent.

Although he writes for a monthly magazine, Mr. Suskind continues to unearth stories that elude the very important daily and weekly journalists in the White House press corps. A year ago, his searing Esquire profile of John DiIulio, the former director of the President’s "faith-based initiative," exposed how cynical political calculations and right-wing ideology had ruined "compassionate conservatism" -- and how little serious thought supports the weak policy process in this administration. Somehow, Mr. DiIulio was induced to recant what he had told Mr. Suskind after conversations with some White House officials.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16272

a lot of good stuff today on O'Neill today!

http://www.salon.com/opinion/huffington/2004/01/14/oneill/index.html

Struggling to reconcile the ever-widening gulf between what the Bush administration claims to be true and what is actually true is getting harder by the day. Scientists at M.I.T. have apparently been having some success using string theory and particle accelerators, but where does that leave the rest of us? Fortunately, Paul O'Neill has a timely, if disturbing, diagnosis, backed up by some 19,000 pages of lab results: The White House is being run by a band of out-and-out fanatics.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/01/15/o_neill/index.html

One of the operating political assumptions of the Bush administration is that the checks and balances have essentially been checked. Every Democratic effort to launch an inquiry in the Senate into the Bush administration's actions, from its abuse of intelligence about WMD in Iraq to its energy policy, has been suppressed. The watchdog press has been kenneled. Bush refers to it dismissively as "the filter" and his chief of staff Andrew Card tells the New Yorker this week that it is unrepresentative and there is no reason to treat it otherwise.

But the implacable wall has been cracked by an insider's surprising confessions, "The Price of Loyalty," as related by journalist Ron Suskind. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, fired and forgotten, mild-mannered and gray, appears an unlikely dissident speaking truth to power. He was, after all, the CEO of Alcoa, a pillar of the Republican establishment.