The great Tony Snow and the awful Helen Thomas

The following, from 2006, is a perfect video.  First, it shows what a horrible person Helen Thomas has always been.  Second, it highlights the Bush White House attitudes towards Israel as well as the late, great Tony Snow’s intelligence, wit and charm.  That’s as good a contrast as you can get to the anti-Israel White House and the crude, condescending buffoonery of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

(The sound quality is poor, so you can find a transcript here.)

In light of Helen’s latest pro-Hezbollah and Hamas rantings, American journalists are backing off a little bit.   Their nostalgia for her “greatness,” though, indicates that they’re much less sorry for what she did than for the fact that she got caught.  After all, acceptable antisemitism emanating from both the Left and the most extreme Right is pretty much de rigueur for the journalistic class.

Words to enrich your spirit

Tony Snow, writing in 2005:

The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don’t. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift – a field of vision others don’t have about the power of hope and the limits of fear; a firm set of convictions about what really matters and what does not. You also feel obliged to share these insights – the most important of which is this: There are things far worse than illness – for instance, soullessness.

(Originally published in the Jewish World Review.)

R.I.P. Tony Snow

Tony Snow had it all:  intelligence, wit, knowledge, values, charm, looks.  You name it.  Sadly, he also had a susceptibility to colon cancer, which is an exceptionally aggressive cancer in young people.  And so he died today, at 53.  R.I.P., Mr. Snow. You will be missed.