Get Me Rewrite!
by Paul Krugman

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.

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Tuning Out the G.O.P.'s Siren Song
by Bob Herbert

But there are other currents moving through this election season that may tend to pull some diverse segments of the population closer together politically. For example, there are few things worse for a president seeking re-election than large numbers of jobless voters. Even in a state as solidly pro-Bush as South Carolina, the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters is a staggering loss of jobs. Neal Thigpen, a political science professor at Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C., said he believes that President Bush will carry the state easily in the fall. But he told me: "I don't think Bush will do as well as he did four years ago. I think his stock is down a little. I'm not gonna kid you."

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An Experiment in Transparency

These documents are drawn from a collection of 19,000 files of Paul H. O'Neill, the U.S. Treasury Secretary for the first two years of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Like all Treasury Secretaries, O'Neill was the top domestic appointment of the President and also a principal of the National Security Council. The files, which range from memoranda to the President to handwritten notes to "sensitive" internal reports, cover a sweeping array of foreign and domestic issues. They also display the attending political and personal matters that often determine policy. They were collected as part of a Treasury Department archiving process in which every item that crossed O'Neill's desk, from every department in government, was copied into a TIF, or image, file. Documents cited in the "The Price of Loyalty" are presented with explanations of context and little comment. They speak, as does all irrefutable evidence, for themselves. More files of compelling public interest will be released in the coming days and weeks.

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