Tony Snow goes off the deep end

August 9, 2006

If you caught today’s press briefing from White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, you saw the president’s spokesperson in rare form.

Unprompted, Snow offered the White House’s official response to the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary (the video is worth watching, just to see the self-righteous earnestness with which Snow delivered his comments).

“Take a look at the blogs today, they’re pretty hot. And the real question for the American people to ask themselves is, do you take the war on terror seriously? With all the developments around the world — and, if so, how do you fight it to win? There seems to be two approaches, and in the Connecticut race, one of the approaches is ignore the difficulties and walk away. Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of the Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to September 11th.”

That’s right, a vote for Ned Lamont is a vote for terrorist attacks. The Lieberman/Bush approach — the one that has increased terrorism around the globe, the one that has undermined the nation’s credibility and standing in the world, the one overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate — is, as far as the Bush White House is concerned, the only credible way to view the world. You’re either with them or against them.

I read a lot of far-right blogs for one of my other gigs, and this is a remarkably common sentiment. If you oppose the war in Iraq — believe it was a mistake, argue that an open-ended commitment is irresponsible, recognize that that it is not helping to make the U.S. any safer — than, in the minds of too many conservatives, you are objectively pro-terrorism.

It’s what leads them to feel justified calling progressives “traitors,” and casually throwing around words like “appeasement” and “treason.”

Consider how Snow concluded his thought on the matter:

“And it’s really up to Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party to figure out how they want to stand in the war on terror. Do they want to have the sort of time-table approach, leave by a date certain? Do they not want to have something constructive to say about gathering threats from Iran and elsewhere? Or do they want to acknowledge the fact that in a dangerous world it takes commitment, it takes persistence?”

It was painfully obvious before, but the White House has completely lost touch with reality.

Why did Joe Lieberman lose yesterday? Because had he been in Crawford today for Snow’s briefing, he likely would have been nodding his head, agreeing with every word.

I wonder when Tony Snow will call William F. Buckley Jr. “pro terrorist.”

  • I found this part of Snow’s tirade interesting:
    “Democracies operate on different principles than totalitarian states. In a democracy, you have to respond to the will of the people. In a democracy within the United States, whether it be Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont competing for votes in Connecticut or on the local level dealing with the needs for people to have safe streets, good schools and services they can depend upon, those are the things — you respond to the state desires of the people. In totalitarian states, the despot alone has the opportunity to declare what he or she wants to do, and frankly, quite often they are much more war-like.

    The president believes, and history will bear him out, that free and democratic states are far more peaceful and create the basis and opportunity, especially in an unstable part of the world, for economic, social, political ties that in the long run are going to be a lot closer than they are today. So those are some of the issues that are raised.”

    If this is a democracy is, than what are we living in now.

  • Didn’t the Iraqi PM say that Iraq would take control of security throughout all of it’s provinces by the end of the year? That sounds like a pro-terrorist time table. We shoud invade..oh wait..we are the ones they are taking over from.

    Did anyone ask Snow if he was having them on? Did they ask if he was calling the voters of Connecticut soft on terror? Does this support the Bush and Rove will help Lieberman theory? Does this mean that Snow had given up on the GOP candidate altogether since he is only drawing distinctions between tLamont and Lieberman?

    So many questions, so few answers.

  • Lamont’s victory has obviously driven the criminals in the White House stark raving mad. They know this is only the first drop of what will soon become a tsunami of defeat, and they’re already coming apart at the seams.

    It’s amazing how important Lieberman appears to be to the White House based on the amount of froth and spume being uttered by the right wing talking heads. What is there about his involvement with the upper echelon of the Bush crime family that we don’t know about yet?

    The way the neocons are going nuts about his defeat, you’d think that it was Bush himself that just got dumped.

    Oooooo, good idea! Let’s work on that, shall we?

  • This is panic – pure and simple. Otherwise, why would a repub White House, largely from Texas, care about a NE Dem primary? This should have been a blablabla moment. If Bush/Rove were at all comfortable with yesterday’s outcome, Snow would have answered that the White House doesn’t care what Dems do in Ct.

  • Blah, blah, blah….
    You can only use that song-and-dance so many times. Even if it were true, it’s totally lost it’s effectiveness.

  • It’s not panic. Their plan is to turn Ned Lamont into one of their evil-freak-Democrat caricatures — an America-hating peacenik from an effete, limp-wristed, hoity-toity background, and definitely a guy you wouldn’t want to have a beer with — and then they want to hang him around the neck of every Democrat in America.

    Will it work? Maybe it won’t, but if it doesn’t, it will be the first time it hasn’t.

  • Their plan is to turn Ned Lamont into one of their evil-freak-Democrat caricatures — an America-hating peacenik from an effete, limp-wristed, hoity-toity background, and definitely a guy you wouldn’t want to have a beer with
    —Comment by Steve M

    I agree and the most dangerous thing all progressives can do is stop being vigilant. Lamont won, but not by much, and now the hatchet work begins for every progressive who dares to say no to King George. Lieberman is a fool to play into that game.

  • With 58-60% of the people now clearly thinking that the Iraq war was a big mistake, I’m sure the Republicans are even more happy in retrospect to have passed the Patriot Act – in view of all the terrorist supporters now on our own shores.

  • The Snow is melting.

    “Democracies operate on different principles than totalitarian states. […] In totalitarian states, the despot alone has the opportunity to declare what he or she wants to do, and frankly, quite often they are much more war-like.” (bonnie #2’s quote from Snow’s tirade)

    So now we definitely know which we live in.

  • ***In a democracy, you have to respond to the will of the people.***
    —Herr Bush’s Propaganda Minister

    So tell us, Tony—does “Joe” have to respond to the will of the people?

    ***In totalitarian states, the despot alone has the opportunity to declare what he or she wants to do, and frankly, quite often they are much more war-like.***
    —[again] Herr Bush’s Propaganda Minister

    Yep—and now, you know why I refer to the little swine as “Darth Lieberman…Dark Lord of the Reich. Lord Lieberman decides that he—and he alone, rather than the majority of those voting in yesterday’s Connecticut primary—can decide the tenets of the election cycle. And, when one compares Lamont to Lord Lieberman, tell me—which of the two is “more war-like?”

    Is it just me—or did SnowFlake go so totally off the deep end today that he actually said something that favors Lamont and the Democratic Party?

  • Steve M. and Gracious are correct. A decades old routine is in process; remember the “Better Dead Than Red” bumper stickers, and the Vietnam War era rhetoric? The underlying messages that “real men” ain’t no libruls, “real men” ain’t no cowards, “real men” don’t need no books, “real men” believe in simple truths (however simple the truths and those people may be) etc., etc, etc. have defined the debate for too long. The core macho tradition of America is what progressives are trying to overcome. How do progessives alter that tradition? How do progressives say that “we’re strong enough men and women that we don’t need to continually prove it”? How do we show that it takes real courage to question, to think?

    Perhaps we should start inventing simple three and four word bumper stickers as per “1984”. How about “Cowards trust Bush” or “Rich folks don’t fight, they steal”. It may not be fair, but the debate for those critical crossover votes seems to revolve mostly around name-calling, not facts.

  • Another Snowmobile:

    […] Throughout American history, generation through generation has been faced with difficulties, …

    “Throughout American history”? — that would include pre-colonial history? Then for sure “generation through generation” were faced with pretty nasty difficulties defending their land and people against the worst possible terrorists — the ones that win. And so began the generations of the Snowmen and the Snowomen.

    Get the drift?

    … and each generation has risen to the challenge and we’re confident this generation will do the same.

    Risen… and fallen.

    Why can’t I stop playing in this slush?

  • “Do you take the war on terror seriously?” No.

    “How do you fight to win?” You don’t.

    .. when the United States walked away, in the opinion of the Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak .. That’s it! Revenge on his father. (It was George XLI who ‘walked away’)

    Snowed under. HELP.

  • It’s panic in “Suffergette City.” I have one word for asinine incumbents: tsunami.

  • “Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of the Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course and that led to September 11th.”

    One might say “when the United States walked away from bin Laden, we all drew from that conclusion that the Bush administration is weak and couldn’t stay that course. It led to Iraq instead.”

  • Just because it’s old retoric, doesn’t mean it won’t work! The current crop of Democrats must rise up and show some backbone to this type of talk. It’s now or never.

  • It’s getting so hard for them to come up with any plausible explanations for their behavior that it ends up sounding like the bullshit that it is. It’s getting so we can’t even get a good snow job out of Tony any more.

  • It is truly amazing, if you take this current WH logic to its fullest, it seems that democracy is undermining democracy. -Kevo

  • First, how ironic that BushCo would pull out the OBL card the day after the election primary. When was the last time any of these people even mentioned him in public?

    Second, I have heard that OBL was fighting along side us during the Gulf war. Is this true? Plus, how could BushCo know any of OBL’s opinions regarding the general strength of the Americans following the Gulf war?

    Third, Steve M. and Gracious, great work keeping us viligant.

    Stop this illegal war!

  • TBone, I dont know if OBL was fighting along side us in Gulf War I – I rather doubt it, since one of his claimed beefs with us is that we “invaded” Saudi Arabia as part of the build up to that war.

    We were, however, allies in a different war: the Afghani war of resistance against the Soviet Union. OBL was involved with getting Islamist Saudis hooked up with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Under the dangerous old principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the U.S. provided training aid, mainly covert, to OBL (and many others who were then fighting against the “Evil Empire”)

    So while he may not have literally fought along with us in Gulf I, it is the case that we actually used US $$$$ to train and fund OBL to form a movement through which he would later attack us.

    And don’t even get me started on the 1980s pictures of our current officials visiting Saddam in his palaces, shaking hands like best of buddies — because he did battle with our enemy Iran.

  • Wow. Talk about running the WH in total campaign mode! Morph Ken Mehlman into T Fox Snow and you get the picture.

    These guys are scarred to death that Bush’s throw of dice in making Iraq the entire War on Terror might actually end badly on their watch. But lets get it exactly straight — the events in Iraq will determine the outcome of Iraq, but not the so called war on terror.

    No matter how the WH portrays the election scenario as just a withering of support from the democrats, there is much erosion of support within their own party. And, conflating Iraq with the war on terror is just nonsense. They made it work for them in 2004, but the people — left, center and right — are not buying that line of shit anymore.

    And to set the record very straight here, the lead up to the war in Iraq was a show case on how democracy is not working in the US. A handful of men, absent of any meaningful democratic debate, brought us the Iraq war. The powerful in Washington really do not like to be reminded of exactly where the real power resides in a democracy.

  • It’s the Republican’t meme of “You don’t want to fight in Iraq so your pro-terrorist and anti-American and a traitor and you make baby Jesus cry, la la la la la…” that Joe Lieberman embraced that lead to his downfall and will lead to the downfall of the Republican’t in 2006 if the Democrats just show some spine.

  • What do you know – two days after liberal terrorist-smoocher Lamont wins, the terror level rises to Red for the first time. They were right – this one primary race has emboldened the terrorists!

    No time to talk, gotta go get some duct tape and plastic sheeting from Home Depot before it’s all gone. If that b*stard Tom Ridge gets in my way, I’m gonna ram him with my cart.

  • Lou, I think you mean “scared to death”.

    “Scarred to death” were the people who were blown up with White Phosphorous in Fallujah by our own guys a few years ago, paid for with our own tax dollars.

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