{"id":1844,"date":"2004-01-15T18:07:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-15T22:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=1844"},"modified":"2004-01-15T18:07:00","modified_gmt":"2004-01-15T22:07:00","slug":"meat-puppet-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2004\/01\/15\/18\/07\/meat-puppet-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Meat Puppet President"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,1101040119-574809,00.html\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often <b>impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas<\/b>. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues that top Cabinet officials were left guessing his mind even after face-to-face meetings. <b>Cheney is portrayed as an unstoppable force, unbowed by inconvenient facts<\/b> &#8230; From his first meeting with the President, <b>O&#8217;Neill found Bush unengaged and inscrutable<\/b>, an inside account far different from the shiny White House brochure version of an unfailing leader questioning aides with rapid-fire intensity. The two met one-on-one almost every week, but O&#8217;Neill says he had trouble divining his boss&#8217;s goals and ideas. <b>Bush was a blank slate<\/b> rarely asking questions or issuing orders, unlike Nixon and Ford, for whom O&#8217;Neill also worked. &#8220;I wondered from the first, if the President didn&#8217;t know the questions to ask,&#8221; O&#8217;Neill says in the book, &#8220;or if he did know and just not want to know the answers<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ideology and electoral politics so dominated the domestic-policy process during his tenure that it was often impossible to have a rational exchange of ideas. The incurious President was so opaque on some important issues&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}