It was confirmed to my satisfaction. The comments were made to Ron Suskind and he reported them in his book The Price of Loyalty about former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill’s stint as Bush’s first Sec. of the Treasury. If I recall it was a few years later when someone who was present for the conversation, one or two people, came out and named Rove as the person who said it. Rove denied it, of course. Suskind wouldn’t confirm it but he didn’t deny it either. I don’t see why anyone would be motivated to attribute the quote to Rove if he didn’t say it. Karl appears often enough in the book that I’m sure Suskind interviewed him, probably multiple times. And it certainly sounds like the sort of thing ol’ “Turd Blossom” would say. I’m convinced he said it.
That’s a great book, btw. O’Neill’s stay was brief in the Bush/Cheney administration and Suskind’s book gave us one of the first peaks behind the curtain. It caused a stir when it disclosed:
”O’Neill had been made to understand by various colleagues in the White House that the President should not be expected to read reports. In his personal experience, the President didn’t even appear to have read the short memos he sent over.
”That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any questions. There are so many worth asking about each of these areas, O’Neill thought as he sat quietly, dozens of queries running through his head.
”’This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over the course of two years,’ he recalled. ‘The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection.’”
O’Neill also shared that Iraq was on the itinerary at the very first cabinet meeting and quoted Dick Cheney as telling him, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”