Posted by
Rhonda O. on Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:03:58 AM
I never, ever want to be confused for some of those Huffington Post bloggers who wish Tony Snow death and despair because he happens to be a representative of the Bush administration. Lest we forget, this is milquetoast and mild-mannered (though smarmy) Tony Snow. Not Joseph Goebbels. But yet the hatred and venom thrown at Snow, after revealing that his cancer has predictably returned (after all, stress is one of the biggest cancer-causing agents. If you want cancer, just get a stressful job, like, uh, say....running for president or representing one), was horrifying but equally predictable from certain segments of the Loon Left. These people were probably the same Che Guevara-loving, patchouli-oil bathing bunch that burned a US soldier in effigy in Portland the other day (after several tries, I might add. These aren't exactly Rhodes scholars we're dealing with).
So no, don't assume that my disdain of Snow is an endorsement of those left-wing bloggers' schadenfreude. This is more of a cautionary tale. It is the tale of a man who carried water for the Bush administration on his own radio show, (and to a lesser extent on a Sunday morning television show) who had to miss out on both of his highly-paying (and yes, stressful!) jobs for several months after being diagnosed with cancer of the colon the first time. Then a few years later, this same man, feeling his oats and the kind of pride a man gets when one overcomes an obstacle that large, takes a job that by all rights he shouldn't take because of the fragility of his health.
Snow did a masterful job of placating the media in his months since settling into the job, being heavy-handed when need be; giving out the talking points dutifully while explaining things in a way that the common man could understand.
Where he lost me was his glib response towards the entire Ramos-Compean fiasco; which as it turns out was just the beginning of the logroll of lies that the Justice Department has been forcefeeding us since Alberto "La Raza" Gonzales has taken over. I know that Snow was just there to do his Snow-Job, but it was the manner in which he delivered these messages- with unfeeling, discompassionate drivel towards two men (and their families) who had been railroaded by a government that not only had put them away- but then took some sort of sadistic pleasure in their fate.
No one deserves cancer, but Snow certainly has not helped himself. His pride, his ambivalence towards things that are of import to the American people, and the knots that no doubt were tied in his stomach from having to dish out a lot of crap on a daily basis, were the culprits in the return of the disease. Snow should come away from the hospital in a few weeks, perhaps learning a little something about humility, empathy, and above all - honesty.