John Nichols (The Nation): Snow Job: White House Prevaricator-in-Chief

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Dated Wednesday April 26

Snow Job: White House Prevaricator-in-Chief
By John Nichols

While it is not merely fair but necessary to challenge the Supreme Court nominations of presidents who seek to stamp a lasting ideological imprint on the Constitution, and even to deny them Cabinet picks who have records of lawlessness, it certainly seems reasonable that they should have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting their fabulists.

It is the job of White House press secretaries to baffle and bamboozle an intentionally naive press corps and, by extension, the Congress and the American people.

The soon-to-be-forgotten Scott McClellan, like his only somewhat more memorable predecessor, Ari Fleischer, never hesitated to dissemble the truth. McClellan's problem as far as this White House was concerned was not his dishonesty, but rather the ineptitude he so frequently evidenced when practicing to deceive.

Veteran Republican retainer Tony Snow will probably be a better prevaricator-in-chief than either McClellan or Fleischer. Why? Because he is a confirmed ideologue who actually believes at least some of the big lies that he will be peddling.

After all, this is the Fox News commentator who, after the most recent State of the Union address, described the Bush administration as having a "brilliant foreign policy."

Read more.

[DBoon]

1. He really IS Baghdad Bob!

nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Don't eat the Yellow Snow. Make his white face angry red on the podium!

Don't eat the Yellow Snow. Make his white face angry red on the podium! He won't be able to be as calm as McClellan.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. My comments to three right wing posters

See the discussion at The Nation, here. Some the typos are fixed.

To CPT:

You know people who JUDGE BEFORE the person even STARTS the job, are hypocritical scum-bots.

Baloney.

Tony Snow has been on FoxNews spewing right wing propaganda, poorly disguised as responsible journalism, for ten years. We know who his is and he has a long track record. We can judge that and assume that he will do no different as White House press secretary. In fact, we are right to surmise that his ability to deliver propaganda with more conviction than either Scott McClellan or Ari Fleischer are exactly why he was pciked.

To Thwan:

Presumably , Nichols isn't saying that judges shouldn't be motivated by their own theories of what a judge should do or be. What Nichols seems to be saying, then, is that judges who seek to substitute their own ideology for the Constitution should be opposed, and conversely, judges who aim to be faithful to the Constitution should be supported.

Yes, that's what he is saying. Do you have a problem with that?

To LL:

Before opening this website, I was 100% sure that either Nichols or Katrina would have some headline with "Snow Job" in it. Total lack of creativity Nichols.

Perhaps. After all, I can claim the moniker Snow Job. And you're right. It wasn't very hard. It really suggested itself.


Now that is the funny part of Nichol's piece. How dare Tony Snow actually have the sincerity of his beliefs? What is even more unforgivable in Nichol's view is that they are conservative beliefs. To top it all off, Bush has the unmitigated gall to actually hire a Press Spokesman who 1)is a conservative and 2)shares Bush's views.

It is not unforvible that Mr. Bush should choose some one of his own ideology for the job, which you call conservative as if it didn't differ from that of Barry Goldwater or Warren Rudman and what I call right wing in recognition that it does. What is unforgivable is lying and the spewing of propaganda.

As Pat Moynihan said, "Every one is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts." On the other hand, as an anonymous White House aide told Ron Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Please read that statement in its context. It's even scarier. It really is an attempt to argue that political power trumps empirical reasoning.

Mr. Snow will be no more successful at stretching the truth than anybody else. He may be smoother, but he's still trying to defy the law of gravity.

The unitary executive theory, at least the Nixonian version of it, was refuted in 1974. If it's illegal and the President does it, he's still breaking the law. He still has to go through procedures to declassify documents; he still has to go to a judge and get a warrant to wire tap American citizens; he still has to charge an American citizen with a crime to justify detaining him. Otherwise, he is breaking the law. The extension of this that the Bush White House seems to want to add is that if the President says it, it isn't a lie. When the statement doesn't jive with the facts at hand, it is false. The political power of the person making the statement is irrelevant. Even King Canute, about as powerful a monarch as there was in his time and place, knew he could not command the tide to go out. Moreover, when the person making the statement knows the statement is false, he is deliberately lying. Mr. Bush and his aides knew that the data on Saddam's possession of weapons was at best inconclusive, but they to say that they knew he had them, that the knew how much he had and that they knew where they were. They were deliberately lying. Neither their imperial power nor Mr. Snow's smoothness will alter reality. They aren't entitled to their own facts and they can't command the tide to go out.