Flip Flopping, Fed Hopping, Greenspan

[Flabbergasted]

Greenspan Backtracks On Iraq War Oil Claim
The Skinny: Former Fed Chief Now Says Oil Wasn't The Reason For U.S. Invasion.


There's not much in government to cheer Alan Greenspan these days.

The former Fed chief may think Hillary Clinton is "very smart" and that President Bush went to war for oil, as he told CBS News' 60 Minutes last night, but he's not any more thrilled with the Democratic Party than the Republicans, he told the Wall Street Journal.

The Goldwater-loving libertarian had nice things to say about the centrist Clinton administration's fiscal politices, but said "the next administration may have the Clinton administration name but the Democratic party ... has moved ... very significantly in the wrong direction," referring to the Democratic party's populist bent, particularly its skepticism of free trade, the Journal reported.

He also (cheerily) put the current odds of the U.S. economy slipping into a recession at better than one in three.

The two other newspapers benefiting from Greenspan's memoir-hawking rounds took away a slightly different messages from their interviews.

The Washington Post focused on the charge in Greenspan's book that "the Iraq war is largely about oil."

The fiscal guru backed off that assertion by suggesting that while securing global oil supplies "was not the administration's motive," it should have been.

He said than when he made the argument that ousting Saddam Hussein was "essential" because of the threat he posed to U.S. oil interests in the region, White House officials told him "Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/17/the_skinny/main3267685.shtml

[Supersedeas]

1. the name of black tea is not to be mentioned in public