Sunday, February 18, 2007

Tony Snow Job

One thing President Bush has done right is upgrading his Press Secretary, from the class nerd (Ari Fleischer) and the clod who couldn’t get a date to the prom (Scott McClellan) to the cool guy on campus, the Hugh Grant of the Bridget Jones movies.

On Meet the Press today, Tony Snow was smooth-talking to explain how the top leaders in Iran are and aren’t behind the Baghdad violence, why Bush welcomes Congress’ input but won’t pay attention to it, that Iraq was a good idea but war is unpredictable.

He made Tim Russert look positively coarse.

In the last century, White House spokespeople tended toward rough-and-gruff ex-journalists like Eisenhower’s Jim Hagerty and JFK’s Pierre Salinger, a great guy now remembered for being the victim of an early web hoax--that the Navy had accidentally shot down an American airliner in 1996.

Well-tailored, wised-up Tony Snow is much too sophisticated to fall for something like that. The former Fox News flunky is better at spinning out misinformation than his current boss, just what America needs when we don’t know whether we’re coming or going in Iraq.

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