Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Tony Snow: better than Novocaine

One of the cool things about going to the dentist (besides the new toothbrush) is that he's thoughtfully installed TVs in the ceiling to distract his patients from the torture they're enduring. And he has full cable, including CNN, which isn't included in my cheap cable package at home. (I really only have it for the high-speed internet.)

So there I was strapped into the Dental Chair of Evil, watching CNN, when white house spokesjerk Tony Snow came on the screen and began blathering about the the prosecutor purge investigation. He used all the georgie talking points like "show trial" and "partisan fishing" and was shoveling the steaming piles with great gusto. An indignant Snow said of the democrats:

“The question they’ve got to ask themselves is, are you more interested in a political spectacle than getting the truth?”

I groaned and cursed ("Muhafuggah! Ut Ullhit!") and the dentist asked me if I wanted some freezing. But then someone asked Snow what happened to the 18 days worth of missing documents from Monday's document dump. It was a pretty important and possibly damning 18 days, since it was the 18 days leading up to the day of the firings. What happened to those missing documents? Well, what, Tony? What? A befuddled Snow replied "That's a great question". Heh. This was getting good.

And it was good. Snow was having a lot of trouble sounding reasonable when he answered questions about the refusal of the white house to allow staff to testify under oath. Well well well -- it's not a trial! No, it's not. (YET.) The reporters weren't buying Snow's explanation that it would be a circus, and really, Snow himself didn't seem totally convinced of what he was saying either. You could almost see him thinking "Ohmyfuckinggod! What have I done!" The icing came near the end when another reporter cited an op-ed that Snow wrote in 1998, lambasting Bill Clinton for trying to do the exact same thing georgie is trying to do now, which is to impede an investigation of the white house. Said the reporter to Snow:

"...But you wrote quite eloquently about this. You said, 'Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold the chief executive accountable. We would have a constitutional right to a coverup.'"

Baahahahaha woohoo! Great briefing: it made me completely forget about the sadist who was diligently scraping my teeth to the nerve. Hopefully there'll be lots more to come: will I get to watch Karl Rove testify at my follow-up appointment in May?