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Tim Russert simplifying the 2000 Presidential election 
We begin our series on Alan Greenspan with a short bio.
Greenspan was born in 1926 to a Hungarian Jewish family in the Washington Heights area of New York City. He attended The Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944. He then attended New York University (NYU), and received a B.S. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1948, and a M.A in Economics in 1950. Greenspan went on to Columbia University but subsequently dropped out. At Columbia, Greenspan studied economics under the mentorship of former Fed chairman Arthur Burns (who constantly warned of the dangers of inflation). Many years later, in 1977, NYU awarded him a Ph.D. in Economics. There is some dispute as to whether he wrote a dissertation, normally required for that degree (it appears that he did not). On December 14, 2005, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commercial Science from NYU, his fourth degree from that institution.
From 1948 to 1953, Greenspan worked as an economic analyst at The Conference Board, a business and industry oriented think-tank in New York City. From 1955 to 1987, Greenspan was Chairman and President of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City. He had a brief interruption from 1974 to 1977 by his service as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1968, Richard Nixon asked Greenspan to serve as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign and Greenspan agreed. Greenspan also has served as a corporate director for Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Automatic Data Processing, Inc.; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.; General Foods, Inc.; J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc.; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York; Mobil Corporation; and The Pittston Company. He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty in 1984. In 1987 he was appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Alan Greenspan has been married twice. His first marriage was to Joan Mitchell in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce one year later in 1953. In 1984, Greenspan began dating journalist Andrea Mitchell. In 1997, they were married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Source: Wikipedia
If you can understand this simple argument then pat yourself on the back. You are one step closer to getting out of the Booboisie!
The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.
McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not "employing out-and-out deception" to make their case for war in 2002.
But in a chapter titled "Selling the War," he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush "managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."
"Over that summer of 2002," he writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."
McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."
McClellan resigned from the White House on April 19, 2006, after nearly three years as Bush's press secretary. The departure was part of a shake-up engineered by new Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that also resulted in Rove surrendering his policy-management duties.
Time and time again, Scott McClellan stepped to the podium to spout the White House line. Did he have misgivings at some point but just kept giving us what the White House wanted to give out: did he know at some point that what he was spouting was a pack of lies; did he blindly spout the White House line and become an unwitting dupe?
Whatever the case, the ranks have been broken big time and we will have to see what the impact of this book will have on us, the people.
