The Spokesman Made for Cable

Tony Snow is increasingly being embraced as a rock star in Republican circles -- but his responsibilities as White House press secretary are suffering accordingly.

Snow's glib, confrontational approach to reporters -- rarely giving straight answers to even the simplest and most legitimate questions -- has made him a hero to Bush partisans and a darling of the right-wing media.

But it's becoming increasingly clear that the fears that some journalists had when Snow first came to the job from Fox News last May have been realized.

Not surprisingly, considering his background, Snow seems to treat his encounters with the press more like a cable show than as an opportunity to provide the public with a fuller picture of what's going on inside the White House. His prime goal seems to be to "win the half hour" -- which generally entails out-talking and mocking your opponent, rather than mustering facts and actually staking out a persuasive position.

In a departure from past practice, Snow last year became the first White House press secretary to actively campaign during an election, headlining a slew of fundraisers across the country.

Since then, he has kept on going, speaking at Republican fundraisers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina just last week. (At the Pennsylvania event, he was introduced as a possible future Senate candidate.) And Snow gave a rousing exhortation yesterday to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

All modern White House press secretaries can reasonably be expected to spend a lot of their time trying to spin the facts to make their boss look good. But in his fervor to make his case, Snow sometimes says things that are simply not true.

In the latest example, Max Blumenthal writes for Raw Story that at his speech yesterday to CPAC, Snow insisted: "We didn't create the war in Iraq. We didn't create the war on terror."

One could certainly argue that the 9/11 terrorist attacks demanded an aggressive response and that President Bush's campaign against terror was not a matter of choice. But the war on Iraq was a war of choice if there ever was one. The Iraqis didn't start it.

To say the White House didn't create that war may be a thrilling rhetorical flourish, but it is also a blatant rewriting of history.

I've been chronicling Snow's more egregious behavior in my column.

Among the recent examples: Snow's assertion in a Feb. 6 briefing that "by some calculations" Bush's tax cuts "have paid for themselves and then some." Bush himself has found all sorts of artful ways to imply that his tax cuts have paid for themselves, without exactly saying as much -- because it's simply not true, as even Bush's economic advisers admit. But Snow has no such scruples. (See the "Tax Cuts Don't Pay for Themselves" section of my Feb. 7 column.)