Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) Calls For Media Inquiry into Patriotism of Congress

Last modified on 2008-10-17 22:26:03 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews this afternoon,  Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota’s 6th district called for a media inquiry into the patriotism of members of the House and Senate.  Charging that liberal and leftist members of Congress did not care for America, the Congresswoman tasked the media with investigating the patriotism of Senators and Representatives.

This came in the wake of a discussion about the anti-Americanism of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.  Oddly enough, it was not very long ago that Congresswoman Bachmann stated to the AP that “If the presidency would somehow go to Barack Obama, I would welcome him to the 6th District as well.  As a matter of fact, I would put my hand on his shoulder and give him a kiss if he wanted to.”  That, of course, a reference to the infamous incident on the floor of the House following George W. Bush’s most recent State of the Union speech when she became very physical with the President.

The statements made by Rep. Bachmann immediately led to a comparison to the late anti-communist crusader Sen. Joe McCarthy.  Bachmann’s comments are interestingly timed, as her re-election race has been narrowing lately, and it would seem appropriate to deem these statements as the highly charged rhetoric of a politician clawing to preserve their office.  While that may explain Rep. Bachmann’s statement, it does not excuse it.  To call any member of the United States House or Senate unpatriotic is wildly absurd.  What is unpatriotic about wading through such theatrical absurdity as this (such statements being the perpetual product of politicians in October), grueling hours on the campaign trail, the constant scrutiny of friends, family, and self, only to, at the end of it, join the body that continually grapples with the most difficult questions in the world?  No sane person would subject themselves to a campaign if they didn’t care about this country and the people who inhabit it.  Of course, the argument can be made that some of the candidates for and members of the Congress are not sane.  If that is the case, I would include Michele Bachmann in that demographic.

Barack Obama is an Elitist

Last modified on 2008-09-22 02:12:33 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Barack Obama is an elitist.  Yes, I said it.  The McCain campaign has faught hard to impress upon voters the belief that Sen. Obama feels he is somewhat better than the “average Joe” and I’m sold.  Thank God.

Why so relieved, you ask?  Because I don’t view a presidential candidate’s elitism as a bad thing.  Elitism and condescension are not the same thing.  What John McCain has become is condescending.  Obama is merely elitist.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Frank Rich wrote the following in his column the other day:

All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

Indeed.  The McCain campaign seems to be primarily focused on lying through its teeth to the American people over and over again, repeating the lie until it becomes, in the eyes of voters, true.  So what does that demonstrate about the mindset of the McCain team?  Apparently the belief there is that the American people are stupid and gullible.

Contrast these two ads.  First, McCain’s infamous ad criticizing Obama for supporting “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners.

Now take a look at the FactCheck.org’s take on that ad.

Then there’s this ad by the Obama campaign:

Not quite on the same level.  My point is simple.  Obama makes his case by pointing out that he is intelligent, knows about stuff like, you know, the “economy”, and proposes some things to do to make things better.  McCain, on the other hand, makes his case by claiming that Obama shows kindergarteners plastic models of penises in his free time.    I’ll take elitism every time, thanks.

Will Truth Out? Media Coverage of the McCain Campaign

Last modified on 2008-08-18 19:45:24 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

According to Politico, the McCain campaign is up in arms over “partisan” coverage of the presidential campaign. It’s nothing new for candidates to deride their media coverage as partisan or otherwise biased, and here’s what did it this time:

Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical…

[NBC News correspondent Andrea] Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.”

A McCain aide said that is not the case: “Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed.”

Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign’s letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides.

While the McCain camp is certainly making more of an issue out of this than there is, Mitchell certainly didn’t seem to be slamming McCain, it is worth our time to take a look at the kind of coverage McCain is receiving. At Riehl World View, the right’s view of the media in this campaign is summed up thusly:

Pity the dumbest of the lot here seems to be the media that either goes along with this garbage out of passion, or lacks the intelligence to grasp what’s going on and point it out.

I agree that much of the media might be playing dumb. I simply disagree that this is where it’s happening. That leads us to Frank Rich, and his column today in the New York Times, which outlines McCain’s coverage quite well:

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Rich also makes a very interesting point about the recent polling stating that voters have “heard too much” about Obama lately.  In contrast to Obama, 40% of Americans feel they’ve “heard too little” about McCain.  So what does present polling data represent?  An electorate saturated with Obama news, certainly not  unexpected given the historic nature of his candidacy and the protracted primary battle, and still somewhat unengaged with McCain.  What does that mean for the McCain campaign?  Bad news.  In a climate heavily favoring Democratic candidates, as-yet undecided voters already have a certain distaste for the Republican party.  John McCain’s news vacuum hasn’t been unique to positive coverage, but has kept to a murmur the level of criticism of the Arizona Senator.   With conventions looming and the home stretch of the race approaching, the McCain campaign may well find itself awash with negative coverage in the coming weeks as media outlets attempt to close the coverage gap and voters become more engaged.  What do most Americans know about John McCain?  His maverick reputation from 2000, his war record, but not much else.  The rest, unfortunately for him, is likely to be bad news, and that doesn’t bode well for November.

Wishful Thinking: The Political Guile of the Bush White House

Last modified on 2008-08-07 06:18:39 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Much ink has been spilled about the political genius of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. What I am left wondering, with the Bush presidency receding behind us, is how that perception came into being. Carlos Watson summed up in 2004 the general perception of Bush’s political prowess:

Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush’s re-election victory [in 2004] and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century…

Bush’s extraordinary political success is probably owed to at least five key things: (1) great political fundamentals, including an ability and willingness to raise large sums of money; (2) an ability to propose a clear, coherent and easily understandable policy agenda (e.g., “compassionate conservatism”); (3) an ability to attract, manage and retain a strong team of advisers (e.g., Rove, Ken Mehlman, Ed Gillespie, Karen Hughes, Matthew Dowd and others); (4) a willingness to go for the jugular — repeatedly and without remorse (e.g., the “flip-flopper” label, gay marriage issue, South Carolina primary in 2000); and perhaps most important (5) a willingness to take a risk repeatedly (e.g., targeting Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle for defeat, offering a Social Security overhaul plan proposal, relying and counting on an evangelical turnout plan).

There is a great deal more to politics than winning elections, although that is often how we measure success. In all aspects, however, I cannot help but view the Bush administration largely as a failure. How, then, did this come to pass? How did we go from Rove and Bush as the political masterminds of a Republican ascendancy to a probable Democratic blowout in 2008?

The problem lies in the fundamental assumptions upon which the Bush political apparatus operates. The idea of the perpetual campaign, the installation of campaign adviser Rove in the policy shop, the perpetual eye on the base, the politicization of the federal bureaucracy — these actions were the product of that supposed political genius, but served to not only stave off the stated goal of a “permanent majority” for the Republican Party, but all but guaranteed a Democratic return to power. Nonetheless, the perception was that the Republicans had engineered a near-perfect system. They combined spectacular get-out-the-vote efforts with pinpointed marketing and data analysis for phone banks, mailings, and advertising time, and were brimming with confidence that this plan would put Republicans in the voting booths in sufficient numbers to avert any disaster. In October of 2006, one month before the Republicans’ November disaster, Time had this to say:

The polls keep suggesting that Republicans could be in for a historic drubbing. And their usual advantage–competence on national security–is constantly being challenged by new revelations about bungling in Iraq. But top Republican officials maintain an eerie, Zen-like calm. They insist that the prospects for their congressional candidates in November’s midterms have never been as bad as advertised and are getting better by the day. Those are party operatives and political savants whose job it is to anticipate trouble. But much of the time they seem so placid, you wonder whether they know something.

They do. What they know is that just six days after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, his political machine launched a sophisticated, expensive and largely unnoticed campaign aimed at maintaining G.O.P. majorities in the House and Senate…

Every Monday, überstrategist Karl Rove and Republican Party officials on Capitol Hill get spreadsheets tallying the numbers of voters registered, volunteers recruited, doors knocked on and phone numbers dialed for 40 House campaigns and a dozen Senate races. Over the next few weeks, the party will begin flying experienced paid and volunteer workers into states for the final push. The Senate Republicans’ campaign committee calls its agents special teams, led by marshals, all in the service of the partywide effort known as the 72-Hour Task Force because its working philosophy initially focused on the final three days before an election.

The 72-Hour Task Force exemplifies the problem of the Bush political machine — running a country is very difficult with one eye focused on the three days before an election. Rove, explains the Top of the Ticket blog at the LA Times, has “long been renowned among co-workers for mining details and all sorts of fascinating tidbits from material that others completely missed.” While Rove certainly does have an eye for details, he misses the big picture in the process. What could possibly go wrong when you run the federal government in such a manner as to maximize the turnout of the Republican base in election years? For one thing, bad policy. What the Bush administration’s political “geniuses” overlooked was the simple fact that most of the American people are not partisan attack dogs. Most voters in this country vote on the basis of whether or not they think the country is being run well. These voters do not define good policy and good results according to a party-line litmus test. This is the ultimate failing of the Bush administration — substituting catch-phrases for government. Is it genius, in a game of chess, to snatch the opposing Queen only to be checkmated on the next move? Pulling out a win is, naturally, a very important part of electoral politics, but it is not the most important part. The most important part of electoral politics is establishing a basis upon which to win the next ten elections. The Rove and Bush never figured that out, and they will face the consequences yet again come November.

On Censorship

Last modified on 2008-10-11 03:15:24 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The story, conveyed to us in spoken word, poem, novel, television show, film, or any of the other myriad forms it may take, is at the very heart of what it is to be human. This brilliant usurpation of mere instinct provides us with the unique capacity to transcend, however briefly or transparently, the absolute singularity of the mind. This most fundamental of human interaction is, then, the arbiter of the most fundamental of human conflicts. In our struggles – derived from no less than other, older stories – the story necessarily becomes the object of our objections. But what stories ought we be allowed to tell? As long as there are authors there will be censors. As long as we are human there will be both. But at what cost does the story come? At what cost its censorship? Oceans of ink and blood have been spilled over our right to speak, but what of our right to hear, or worse yet, to listen? Who determines the stories we can tell and have told to us? Who should? Having now offered up this purgatory of hyperbole, let us now turn towards the more pragmatic concerns of censorship today – beginning with the lens of history – and perhaps find our way back to these more universal questions.

We must go rather far back to find one of the most intriguing victims of censorship in the history of the written word. The Yahwist or Jehovist or, more succinctly, “J” composed the earliest written portions of what later became the Torah around 950 BC. The Yahwist composed portions of the Book of Numbers, the first half of Exodus, and about half of Genesis. As G. Douglas Atkins puts it, the Yahwist is “stubbornly restless, probing, skeptical, constantly engaged in an effort to demystify and demythologize, attempting to reveal the constructed-ness and fictionality of all things.” (Atkins, 1980) The original work of the Yahwist would be subject to near constant censorship and revision over the five centuries that followed. The God of the Yahwist was, as Harold Bloom succinctly puts it, “human – all too human: he eats and drinks, frequently loses his temper, delights in his own mischief, is jealous and vindictive, proclaims his justness while constantly playing favorites, and develops a considerable case of neurotic anxiety when he allows himself to transfer his blessing from an elite to the entire Israelite host. By the time he leads that crazed and suffering rabblement through the Sinai wilderness, he has become so insane and dangerous, to himself and to others, that the J writer deserves to be called the most blasphemous of all authors ever.” (Bloom, 1994) That creative redacting, following through to Ezra, is one of the earliest examples of censorship. Such a God was ill-suited to provide the contrast with the vindictive deities of the pagan traditions that allowed Judaism to grow beyond the few nomadic followers of Yahweh of its early years.

In 25 AD the historical works of Aulus Cremutius Cordus were burned by order of the Senate, supposedly for having eulogized Brutus and Cassius in what was viewed as an unduly positive light – quite evidentiary of that other most prominent cause of censorship: politics. Two factors comprise the authority behind which censorship is almost always employed – the political, as demonstrated by the burning of Cordus’ work, and the moral, the latter usually couched in a particular religious tradition, and the two often intertwined. Examples of both litter the remaining pages of history, most graphically in instances of book burning. Priscillian of Ávila, who bears the distinction of being the first in the long line of Christians executed for heresy by fellow Christians, had many of his writings deemed heretical and burned in 383. In 650 Caliph Uthman ibn ‘Affan oversaw the creation of the Qur’an as we now know it, and subsequently had all other versions destroyed. Over the course of the 13^th Century the Catholic Church systematically exterminated the Cathar sects of southeastern France, in the process burning nearly all of their writings. In 1242 the French government burned every copy of the Talmud in Paris following a trial in which the book was “found guilty.” In 1410 John Wycliffe, intellectual leader of the Lollards whose protégée Jan Huss would pioneer the giving of mass in the vernacular, had his books burned by Zbynek Zajic z Házmburka, Archbishop of Prague, who, incidentally, could not read. In 1562 the Bishop of the Yucatan, Fray Diego de Landa, burned the sacred texts of the Maya. In 1624 the Pope ordered the burning of Luther’s translation of the Bible in Germany. In 1683 students and faculty at Oxford burned a number of works by Hobbes and others. In 1842 the School for the Blind in Paris burned all the books they had containing the newly created Braille code.

This brings us to perhaps the most notorious instance of book burning in history, which was committed by the Nazis beginning on May 10, 1933 at the Humboldt University and Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexuality) in Berlin. The precursor to that fateful night took the form of the Harmful Publications Act of 1926, which was instituted by the Weimar government. Klaus Petersen sums up well the terrific importance of this act: “Its significance lies in the fact that, more than any other censorship law of the time, it owed its emergence to broadly based groups and organization that persistently tried to mold public opinion morally and ideologically to their own patterns of thought and behavior.”(Petersen, 1992) Seven years later, when over 25,000 “un-German” books were burned in Berlin, it was the students of Germany’s universities who did the burning. They burned Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Kerr, Ernest Hemingway and Marc Chagall, Friedrich Engels and Jack London, Upton Sinclair and H.G. Wells. But what was the nature of this action? It clearly wasn’t purely anti-Semitic in nature, as all the authors were not Jews. Censorship, wrote Harrell Rodgers, originates, at least in part, from a question of status. “When public policies are formulated they answer a critical question: ‘On behalf of what ethnic, religious, or other cultural group is this government and this society being carried out?’ (Gusfield, 1963). Thus, governmental policies concerning civil rights, religion, welfare, and obscenity all involve the weighing of the government’s influence on the side of one set of values as opposed to others… Censorship campaigns involve defense of traditional moral standards and the societal position of those who defend those standards. Changes in the definition of acceptable sexual speech raise questions about the validity of the moral standards considered sacred by some members of society and questions about the dominant culture in society… Censorship campaigns, therefore, involve attempts to restore to prominence a certain value system or efforts to make certain that new values do not make serious inroads into the community.” (Rodgers, 1975)

Two decades later, in 1953, a similar phenomenon took place in the United States, under the banners of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist zealotry. At McCarthy’s urging, the State Department removed from the shelves of its libraries in Europe “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc.” Some of these books were subsequently burned. This, too, was a case of censorship in pursuit of the maintenance of a societal position. The communists were to be feared, and were to be rooted out wherever they were. America had turned fiercely xenophobic in war time, the Japanese internment camps were evidence enough of that, and McCarthy sought to wipe out any dissention in order to maintain that apprehension. Fear was, of course, the source of his power. In the absence of any communist literature or argument, it would be much easier to prove to the public how dangerous they were for it would be impossible for communists, or their so-called sympathizers, to argue otherwise.

The defining characteristic in these actions is, of course, the involvement of government or political authority. In turning towards the issues of censorship we face in the United States today, this kind of government involvement largely does not exist. Attempts have been made, but by and large (excluding free speech issues as engaged in campaign finance and the like) have been struck down by the courts as clear violations of Constitutional mandates. What we are faced with, then, is not censorship of the people by the government, but rather censorship of the people by themselves. That McCarthy was eventually struck down by a domestic popular backlash, unlike the Nazis, is evidentiary of Americans’ stubbornness in the defense of their liberties. But that tenacity seems to be leveled most ferociously when it is the government which oversteps its bounds – and it is not the government itself which gives greatest cause for concern.

The censorship we face today comes in many shapes and sizes, largely irrespective of political ideology. Conservative religious organizations stage burnings of Harry Potter novels, seek to regulate sexual material in films and television shows, and try to pull morally objectionable materials from library shelves. Abortion rights activists seek limitations on anti-abortion picketers at clinics. In the modern United States, purely political censorship has become a dangerous gambit, and is rarely practiced. Correspondingly, the bulk of our would-be censors come forth individually or in extra-governmental groups from a pedestal of perceived moral superiority – a superiority they seek to demonstrate to, and to impress upon, their opposition. This fight is, not unexpectedly, often focused on the access of children to material perceived by parents to be morally questionable, which leads us to one of the most highly publicized censorship battles of our time: Harry Potter.

Zeeland, Michigan and its 5,800 residents played host to one notable brawl over J.K. Rowling’s magical children’s series. Eight years ago school Superintendent Gary Feenstra, at the behest of several parents, removed the series from library shelves, banned their reading in classrooms, required parental approval for access to them, and stopped the further purchase of copies of the books. Similar moves took place in school districts all over the country – coinciding with highly publicized public burnings of the novels. The courts have – rightly – removed such restrictions on the books in libraries and school districts nationwide. Nonetheless, these actions, repeated time and again with books considered “inappropriate” for one reason or another, constitute a dangerous element in our civic culture if left unchecked.

I do not intend to say that fighting to have certain books removed from library shelves or classrooms is inherently wrong. It is not. There should certainly be restrictions placed upon what children can read or watch. Those restrictions, however, should not be dictated by the whims of handfuls of vocal parents. In 2002 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued as its summer reading “Approaching the Qur’an”, a text on the Islamic holy book, and controversy erupted. The cries of Muslim advocacy and anti-Christian indoctrination were predictable, and boisterous, and the dynamics which fueled them were the same which have always fed the flames of book pyres. It was a lashing out of orthodoxy and heavy-handed, willful ignorance. Of course there were denunciations of UNC as having committed a crime, in Bill O’Reilly’s words, equivalent to assigning Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in 1941. It is that very blatant kind of dissimilitude that makes such efforts at censorship so patently ridiculous. I would think a more rational comparison would be an Islamic school mandating the study of the Bible in 1187 as Philip II and Richard I descended upon the Holy Land.  Of course, to some in this country, as has been the case everywhere and at every time, any attempt to understand that which is alien to us comes to be perceived as some kind of concession — a surrender of some fraction of that abstraction that makes us American.  What danger is there in the pursuit of understanding?  Some would have it that it is a step towards an unwanted pluralism, the calls of the Know-Nothings echoing out of the darker, meaner halls of history.  Others may simply fear the humanization of a foe.  How much harder it is to wage war when the bombs are landing on human beings, not devils made flesh!  Some, perhaps, merely lash out at anything beyond the standard American lexicon.  It is a misguided adventure, whatever the motivation.

But do not get me wrong, it is well within the rights of those who challenge books or television shows or movies to do so, just as it is within their rights to withhold them from their children, for a time. But exercising such outrageous arrogance as to withhold ideas, legitimate or not, controversial or tame, without even consideration of the needs and desires of those from whom they are being withheld is, dare I say it, fundamentally un-American. There will always be those who seek to protect others from what they view as obscene, corrupting, inappropriate or unpatriotic. A driving purpose of our democracy and of our humanity is, then, to protect that which we value in spite of these denunciations. We are dependent upon the free exchange of ideas, and we must view it as our sacred duty to protect that exchange whenever possible. We are perpetually engaged in the struggle between past and future, and I, for one, will side with the future. There is no greater freedom than the ability to seek out new ideas and information, regardless of how contrary to an individual’s personal beliefs those ideas may be. There is no danger to the individual in the dissemination of ideas. The greater the conflict between our ideas, and the lesser our conflict over which ideas we may consider, the better our ideas will become. The danger that some would proscribe as threatening our youth or our righteousness is a danger that only presents itself to those institutions that perpetuate our shortcomings. There is no permissible way to limit this attack on change and openness – it would be the very icon of self-defeatism. There is only one path for the determined advocate of choice to take, and that is to read, to watch, to listen, to disagree and agree when the evidence presents itself, to question, to answer, to debate and to discuss. Our inquisitive minds burn hotter than any paper, and we must use that inextinguishable flame to fight fire with fire.

Those who choose to denounce the cries of indecency in the name of personal choice, responsibility, and intellectual freedom have given the world access to Joyce, Salinger, Hemingway, Galileo, Socrates, Goethe, Aristophanes, Hawthorne, Greene, Orwell, Pynchon, Steinbeck, Morrison, Boccaccio, Faulkner, Flaubert, Whitman, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Paine, Heller, Balzac, Bradbury, Dreiser, and Rabelais, all of whom were or are subject to the censor’s ire. I, for my part, am thrilled to have such company.

Tony Snow: Press Secretary, Comedian, Father, Husband, Patriot

Last modified on 2009-01-05 21:19:54 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Former journalist and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow died early Saturday morning at the age of 53, succumbing to the colon cancer he had battled since he was first diagnosed in early 2005. Whatever you may think of the President he spoke for, no one can deny that Snow was a dedicated family man, a uniquely talented Press Secretary, a patriot. I wish his family all the best in these difficult times. I think these videos sum up his legacy quite well.