As many of you know (and don't care), Tony Snow was recently diagnosed with some sort of liver cancer and has had to take an extended leave from his post as White House Press Secretary. While I hate to sound jubilant at his departure (as Bush Administration press secretaries go, he seemed like an alright guy), I have to think this was the best thing that ever happened to the Bush Administration -- or indeed political journalism -- because of his replacement, the delectable Dana Perino.
Ms. Perino is one fine press secretary, as anyone can plainly see. One wonders how long she's been on staff and why she hasn't been doing this since the beginning. It's easy to get mad at a slick talk show host like Tony Snow, but Perino... who could stay mad at her?
It really takes the edge off. Not only is she seemingly less slick and more like a regular human being than the previous press secretaries, but when she does lie, it seems like she doesn't want to. There's something endearing about it. Somehow it recalls the Dostoyevskian 19th century Russian heroine, stuck in a world of vice and corruption, doing what she has to do, nevertheless engaged in the sublime struggle for an ethereal inner purity, perhaps ultimately incongruous with reality, but heroic all the same.
Perhaps you'll fault me, dear reader, for letting my guard down. You'll remind me, I'm sure, that she is nevertheless just another Bushie, perhaps with a prettier face than most, but a Bushie just like Snow and McClellan and Fleischer before her. And you may be right for all I know. Maybe I am entranced and bewitched and just maybe I've taken leave of my senses as I am wont on occasion to do. But I must insist that even in a national scene of scorched earth politics, one must at times stop to smell the roses.
Even if there are some who, in the name of politics and what is good and proper in a forum such as this, cannot allow that there is anything good in the opposition, I must dissent. Indeed, the beauty that is Ms. Perino would not be possible were it not for the impossibility of her situation, mired as she is in the morass of inequity that is the Bush Administration, charged with finding the good therein, the Sonya to the Raskalnikov of Rove's political machine.