Whirled News - Tony Snow Tributes Mirror His Press Secretary Tenure

As befitting his career, the death of former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, whose charm put an affable human face onto policies responsible for the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, triggered a whirlwind of false spin this weekend.

Mr. Snow himself, in his trademark manner, best described his accomplishments, calling his tenure as Press Secretary, "The most…intellectually aerobic job I'm ever going to have.” For a former Fox News anchor, the words were both characteristically misleading and uncharacteristically accurate.

During his stint with cancer, Mr. Snow advised people, “Don’t think about dying. Think about living.”

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans with no health care tried futilely to follow his advice.

Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, called Snow a "renaissance man." Later accused of hyperinflating irony, Mr. Ailes responded, “Machiavelli was a Renaissance man, wasn’t he?”

“We learned a lot from him — most importantly how we should love our families and treat one another,” said current White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.

Later, Ms. Perino clarified her remarks, stating she meant that Mr. Snow taught us how we should treat our families and rich, conservative White Americans.

Meanwhile, former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who died last week, continued his surprisingly quick progress to the innermost circle of Hell, making a close race between he and Tony Snow highly unlikely.

“So far all our efforts to slow Mr. Helms down have been completely futile,” said a spokesdevil for Satan, “He stepped right on top of the poor children we had tied onto the bridge between our first two circles, insisting that nothing would stand in his Christian path to do battle with Lucifer. Then we placed two hundred Black people on mules with nooses around their necks that had been looped over trees, thinking it would take him several days to whack the mules on their rumps, but the daunting task delayed him for just an hour-and-a-half, and at the end he actually seemed re-energized.”

Mr. Helms similarly skirted a diversion between the 4th and 5thcircles. Satan’s minions had lined up six hundred tobacco farmers who stood in line for federal subsidies behind three thousand barrels of thousand dollar bills, but instead of handing the money out carefully, Mr. Helms kicked over every barrel in record time, yelling, “Come and get it!”

Later, a spokesdevil for Lucifer admitted to poor planning, commenting, “We should have foreseen this. That’s the way the Coalition Provisional Authority handed out money in Iraq.”