The White House was the beneficiary of a brilliant stroke of luck today:
Tony Snow, the press secretary to President Bush, has suffered a recurrence of the colon cancer he battled two years ago, and the disease has spread, reaching the liver, White House officials said Tuesday.
Hooray! How fantastic for the Bush administration that Tony Snow’s been diagnosed with what will likely be terminal cancer!
This couldn’t have come at a better time. Bush’s numbers are in the toilet, but now they can capitalize on the disease to paint a sympathetic picture of the administration. In fact, they didn’t waste any time:
Mr. Bush made an official announcement in the Rose Garden.
“His attitude is, one, that he is not going to let this whip him, and he’s upbeat,” the president said. “My attitude is, is that we need to pray for him and for his family.”
Kudos to Mr. Bush for striking the perfect balance of strength and sympathy. Without Snow being sentenced to death, he’d never have been granted such a fabulous opportunity to exhibit those qualities.
Another excellent benefit of acquiring cancer is that everyone turns your flaws into compliments:
With his flippant style and his artful ability to dodge questions, Mr. Snow is generally considered to have helped strengthen the White House press operation.
It used to be considered a negative when our elected officials would use their minions to treat the media with disrespect and/or refuse to answer any questions with a hint of honesty. But now that Tony hit the cancer lottery, he’s a saint, and the administration gets to bask in his holy glow.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the administration irradiated Snow in the hopes that the disease would return and they’d reap all these awesome rewards…
Oh, I’m sorry, is this an offensive way to talk about Tony Snow’s disease? Does this seem callous and unreasonable?
THEN PLEASE INFORM KATIE FUCKING COURIC.
That is all.
seems reasonable to me.
I don’t get the preposterous hypocrisy that results from these announcements, annointing known liars, preposterous PR flacks and other known evildoers as saintly or good, just because their deaths have suddenly become imminent. It doesn’t, usually, omprove their character or judgement.
Thank you for this post. I was just saying last night that while I don’t wish cancer on anyone, the timing of this couldn’t have been better. The righties will now have to lay off Edwards or get risk getting socked with their own hypocritical Snow balls.
I want a Katie interview with Tony Snow! No fluffy cotton-candy interview this time…I want her to ask Tony the tough questions, and maybe Bush could sit in and offer his insight, too (he can even bring Cheney along if he must).
Katie will undoubtedly ask whether Bush is going to attend Tony’s funeral, and if he thinks that will be distracting, like his non-presence at 3,200 other funerals is designed not to be distracting. She’s got the good questions.