Nice Time To Tell Us (!)

Update: Mad Kane provides the whole thing in haiku form.

CNN reports: Greenspan book: GOP ‘swapped principle for power’

(CNN) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan slams President Bush and today’s Republicans, while calling Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton “the smartest presidents” he worked with, according to an advance copy of his upcoming book.

He further says the GOP deserved the stomping it took in November’s congressional elections — a ballot that saw both houses of Congress wrested from Republican control — because the party “swapped principle for power.”

His book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” is scheduled for release Monday. CNN obtained a copy Saturday.

In the book, Greenspan wrote that Bush essentially left an unbridled GOP Congress to spend money however it saw fit, and by not vetoing a single bill in six years, the president deprived the nation of checks and balances.

“The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” Greenspan wrote. “They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

The Sunday Times [the real one in London] writes: Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

I guess telling the American people this prior to the 2004 presidential election would have hurt his book sales. The man had a platform to affect public opinion but chose to remain silent while everything went to hell. There should be a price for silence, and Greenspan should pay it. He stood by while the economy imploded and thousands of American troops died in a war for oil and waited to write about it in a book. This is a perfect example what Ayn Rand advocated – a total absence of conscience.