And so it goes. lets stop the presses and do a special on the life of....hey, lets do a couple or three... nothings going on anyway, and its been so long since Timmy... And what a great guy he was as well... The reporters ARE the news
Tony Snow: deliverer of lies, fudger of truths, all around mensch. But....where does his responsibility begin for this?:
As Tony Snow, the White House press secretary had indicated earlier, he has decided to resign his post with the Bush administration, effective Sept. 14.
Mr. Snow, who has been battling a recurrence of colon cancer and just finished a lengthy set of chemotherapy treatments, had said that he intended to leave before the end of President Bush’s second term. In recent interviews, he said he would depart for financial, not health reasons.
The former journalist with Fox News who had a nationally syndicated talk show received a salary of nearly $170,000 as White House press secretary, far less than his cable show earnings.
He recently told Hugh Hewitt: “I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons,” Mr. Snow said. “I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.”
Mr. Snow, 52, is one of several Bush administration officials who have decided to leave the White House. His resignation follows those of Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom decided to leave earlier this month.
It looks like Tony Snow isn’t doing too good. A growth near his abdominal area was discovered to be cancerous, and spread to his liver.
Too bad, huh?
What?
Do I sound cruel? Insensitive? Yeah, I know I do, but I can’t help it. No, I'm not proud of it, but I can't feel much sympathy for Mr. Snow.
Besides, bad as it is for Tony Snow right now, he still has it better than most of us. He’s wealthy (which we’re not), so he can afford to take the time off from his job as long as he needs to (which we can’t), and get the best doctors and medical treatment available to him (which we can't afford). Being Bush’s hand puppet was a well-paying gig, and Tony was great at it. Cancer doesn’t discriminate, but you don’t want to be in the ER with a tin cup either.
Maybe to his rich white Republican friends sending him “Get Well” cards Tony Snow was a good guy, but he hated the rest of America, and he let us know it. As a newspaper columnist, a talking head on Fox, or press secretary for the President, he was always the same: a smug, narrow-minded bigot. But because Tony Snow was articulate, and handsome and had a nice smile, it was O.K. Hey, if you’re not parading a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika, you can’t be racist, right? Just ask Ann, or Rush, or Sean.
He didn’t build the GOP’s Pretty Hate Machine, but he certainly kept it running and well-oiled. And Tony Snow never met a queer, tofu-eating, dope-smoking, Bible-burning, terrorist sand nigger he couldn’t beat up on.
And he liked it.
I'm not enough of a bastard to wish him dead, but only because of his wife and children. Nobody deserves to be a widow. Nobody deserves to be a orphan.
But say a prayer for him?
I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time. I’m busy.
I’m saying prayers for the soldiers fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Walter Reed. I’m saying prayers for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis trying not to get shot, raped, tortured or blown up. I’m saying prayers for the people of New Orleans who helplessly watched their friends, family, jobs, homes, neighborhoods, culture, and future drown. I’m saying prayers for all the besieged working-class heroes in America who are one paycheck away from bankruptcy, unemployment, and homelessness.
So, you expect me to waste a prayer on Tony Snow, one of the grinning cheerleaders who helped get us into Dubya’s incompetent, blood-soaked obscenity of an administration in the first place?
While going through old VHS tapes the other day I found a tape I'd made of a special memorial program broadcast after Gene Siskel died in 1999. In some circles, it was Siskel who was regarded as the "real film critic" of the Siskel and Ebert duo, while Ebert was just a hack.
Of course, these are the people who gave me fits during my seven years of reviewing movies; the kind of cinéastes who don't like any movie that isn't made in the Czech Republic or by Lars Von Trier and isn't 4 hours long. People used to tell me I was a good reviewer, but mostly all I did was write about movies and tell people what I thought. I never professed to have any kind of great knowledge of the Art of Cinema. I wrote because I wanted to write, and that was all.
To those in the know, "film critics" are people like Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Denby, Armond White, and of course the Doyenne of All Film Criticism, Pauline Kael. But just as Beverly Sills made opera accessible to those who don't like opera, Roger Eberg has made film reviews accessible to people who just like movies and don't know a gaffer from a key grip.
When you strip movies of all the mystique, what you end up with are "honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars." This is something that Roger Ebert has always understood. The reason that Ebert's reviews have always been mandatory reading is that Ebert always evaluates a movie within the context of its genre and what it's trying to do, rather than judging an action shoot-em-up by how it stands up against Dancer in the Dark.
Yet Ebert has never been the kind of quote whore whose blurbs are usually the earmark of a movie you should be sure to skip. For while he has never been guilty of taking movies too seriously, perhaps no one else has been a bigger booster of creative filmmaking. And no one's image has been as iconic in its association with film criticism. And so it's hard to underestimate the courage it took for Ebert to appear Wednesday night at the Overlooked Film Festival, which he created.
The recent cancer announcements of Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow caused a nationwide epidemic of discomfort, as Americans faced the prospect of having to look cancer right in the face. Well, Elizabeth Edwards was right there at the Democratic candidates debate last night, and Tony Snow plans to return to work on Monday despite a dire prognosis. Roger Ebert has been rendered unrecognizable by surgery to remove part of his jaw as part of treatment for salivary gland cancer last June. He wrote about it earlier this week:
I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the Festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out.
So let’s talk turkey. What will I look like? To paraphrase a line from “Raging Bull,” I ain’t a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn’t look like we belonged on TV.)
What happened was, cancer of the salivary gland spread to my right lower jaw. A segment of the mandible was removed. Two operations to replace the missing segment were unsuccessful, both leading to unanticipated bleeding.
A tracheostomy was necessary so, for the time being, I cannot speak. I make do with written notes and a lot of hand waving and eye-rolling. The doctors now plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored.
So when I turn up in Urbana, I will be wearing a gauze bandage around my neck, and my mouth will be seen to droop. So it goes.
I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what? I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.
Although months in bed after the bleeding episodes caused a lack of strength and co-ordination, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago restored my ability to walk on my own, climb stairs, etc. I no longer use a walker much and the wheelchair is more for occasional speed and comfort than need. Just today we went for a long stroll in Lincoln Park.
We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my Festival.
Why do I want to go? Above all, to see the movies. Then to meet old friends and great directors and personally thank all the loyal audience members who continue to support the Festival. At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is “overlooked,” or why I wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
Being sick is no fun. But you can have fun while you’re sick. I wouldn’t miss the Festival for anything!
If we had not recently seen Katie Couric attack Elizabeth Edwards on 60 Minutes for not having the decency to go home, die quietly, and not subject us to having to watch her condition slowly deteriorate, we might think that Eberts' friends concerns about bad press coverage to be misguided. But with cancer still the disease we dread most, it's inspiring to see high-profile people battling the disease refusing to just go away and hide. Roger Ebert loves movies, and for him to not attend this festival even if he had to be carried in on a sedan chair is unthinkable. And while there may yet be unfavorable coverage, so far what most papers are recounting is the standing ovation he received and the love the attendees have for this man who has arguably done more for the movies than anyone else in his field.
For those of us who have been admirers of Roger Ebert's work, the idea of a man who has made his living and his reputation through language being unable to speak is unspeakably cruel. And yet Ebert is right -- as long as he can think and type, he can still do his work. And so Roger Ebert joins Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow to form an unlikely trifecta of courage in the face of disease -- and show us how important it is to refuse to go quietly.
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow's surgery to remove a small growth showed that his cancer has returned, the White House said Tuesday.
Snow, 51, had his entire colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with colon cancer. A small growth was discovered last year in his lower right pelvic area, and after months of monitoring, tests now show that it has grown slightly. It was removed Monday.
Doctors determined that it was cancerous, and found during the surgery, which was exploratory, that his cancer had metastasized, or spread, to his liver, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
She said Snow is comfortable and feeling fine after his surgery and has pledged to aggressively fight the disease with an as-yet-to-be-determined chemotherapy treatment course. He will be in the hospital recovering from the surgery, a major procedure, for about a week.
"He said he's going to beat it again," Perino said in an emotional morning briefing with White House reporters. "When I talked to him, he was in very good spirits."
Now if we were like Rush Limbaugh, we would accuse the White House of timing this announcement as a distraction from l'affaire Gonzales. If we were like Katie Couric, we would say that "some say" the timing was suspicious. But since we still have our souls and our humanity, we know that cancer makes its own time, and it is never a good time for cancer. So we will just say that our wishes are for Tony Snow, like Elizabeth Edwards and every other cancer patient, to somehow make it through, and our thoughts are with both families today.
A POSTSCRIPT: I don't know enough about Tony Snow's previous bout with colon cancer to know if he had undergone screening previously, but just as Elizabeth Edwards' cancer should prompt every woman over the age of 40 to get a baseline mammogram if she hasn't already done so and every woman who's been putting it off for years to make an appointment; so Snow's cancer should prompt everyone who is 50 or over to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. I am the biggest wuss in the world where medical procedures in the world are concerned and I was terrified about it. Mine showed one small polyp, which was removed, and I have to go in again in three years. And you can bet that by mid-2009, I'll have had another one. These screenings are not foolproof, but right now they're the best tool we have.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery, ya big galoot. And remember, there's always room on our side for a mensch...in case you change your mind and decide you don't care for that side of the street after all. Just sayin'....and get well soon.
And while you're sending out beams of positive energy to people who are ill, save some for Steve Gilliard, who is still in very bad shape. And you might consider tossing some shekels in his direction at The News Blog. I don't know what kind of insurance he has, but it sounds like he's in for a long and expensive recovery.
