Presidential spokesman Tony Snow’s surgery to remove a small growth showed that his cancer has returned and spread to his liver, 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….
It is unclear if or when Snow will return to his duties. Perino, the White House’s deputy press secretary, is leading the news briefings in his absence…. Snow and his wife, Jill, have three young children.
Our very best wishes to Mr. Snow and his family.
…Seriously.
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He sold his soul to the devil.
you would break the deafening silence on this post. đŸ˜‰ and i take the silence until now to essentially have been expressing in textual void what you have spelled out. of course, the conservs will now descend and protest this, although they shed no tears here, croc or otherwise, beforehand you chimed in.
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in all honesty, snow’s condition raises a conflict in me. no one should have to face cancer. no one. yet i am not one bit sad that the vagaries of life have removed him from his position in the regime. he was the mouthpiece for an evil administration. not sad to see him move along. just sad at why he has to.
surprised, however, to see one from you.
please see my response below about separating someone’s illness from their actions. did we stop criticizing reagan when he developed polyps? no, not should we have. same goes here.
http://www.huffingto…
…I usually agree with both of you (Raj and Laurel) on most posts, but we part company here.
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I feel for the guy as a human being. He has cancer, for God’s sake. Just because we don’t like his politics or the administration he works for doesn’t mean we can’t sympathize with another human being who has to endure yet another bout with this awful disease.
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I wouldn’t wish cancer on my worst enemy.
and you will see that we apparently agree. i don’t wish cancer, or any illness for that matter, on anyone. i have stated that clearly. cancer is rampant in my family – i know what it is like to deal with and the snow family does not deserve that fate any more than my family members did. but am i glad that tony snow is no longer press secretary? yes. why should his cancer somehow make him immune from criticism for promoting the bush administration? as i said, i’m sorry about the reason he had to leave the job. but i can separate his reason for leaving from the reason he was there.
That is, when you read the whole thing carefully. Snow is a bad man who has a bad disease. I’d rather he be a bad man alive than a bad man dead, and I believe Laurel does as well — contracting cancer does not make one’s faults go away. If we had found out he was resigning because he was offered a better job on some board, we’d be rejoicing to get rid of him. While this is not the ideal second or post to analyze his fault and shortcomings, the fact that Snow is willing to peddle smear for Bush while fighting cancer means that part of his personality remains fair game.
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I hope Tony Snow has a speedy recovery with as little pain as possible, and emerges cancer free. This would have been true of any member of the administration. I wish Tony Snow will get out of our White House and stop aiding Bush’s truculent mendacity. This would have been true of any member of the administration. The two are not exclusive.
…Laurel @ Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 17:12:18 PM EDT
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no one should have to face cancer. no one.
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That’s a nice feeling, but the sad fact is that some people do have to face cancer. And the longer we live, the more likely that more people will have to. All of my uncles on my father’s side died of cancer, and my uncle on my mother’s side died of juvenile-onset polio. My elderly father (he’s in his late ’80s) has prostate cancer, but the doctors have told him that operating would be more dangerous than applying palliatives, given his advanced age. My father is still very vigorous despite his advanced age and–more problematic for him–macular degeneration. As to the latter, fortunately for him, my mother can still see well enough to drive. Oddly, he still votes very Republican, indicating, yet again, that, as long as Republicans get their wellfare, they’re more than happy to vote for the anti-gay Republicans.
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As to Snow, I do not wish him badly, but I would wish that he and others to just go away and stop shilling for people who obviously don’t give a tinker’s damn for people who are in similar situations that Snow is in. I’m sure that he and his will make out very nicely, but…what about the others?
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BTW, Laurel, if I had to worry about whether the right wing nut cases would descend on every web site that I commented on, I’d never comment anywhere.
I have a hard time believing the raj and Laurel comments above.
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Is there never a time out for simple human decency? Might not events like the simultaneous tragedies befalling the Edwardses and Snows help all of us to have some perspective and to reach out to one another in our common humanity? Especially those of us on the left, who pride ourselves on compassion?
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I yield to no one in my loathing for this administration and everything it stands for. But someone else will come along and be the mouthpiece for George W. Bush. Again, as David’s post concluded, “Snow and his wife, Jill, have three young children.”
for those who have made a career of persecuting innocent people? stunningly inappropriate is right.
Especially those of us on the left, who pride ourselves on compassion?
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I am not on the left.
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I have gone so far here as to praise the Bush malAdministration for eliminating the federal estate tax (something that is anathema to those on the left) and have half-jokingly (but only half) approved the malAdministration’s reduction in income tax rates.
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And regarding
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Again, as David’s post concluded, “Snow and his wife, Jill, have three young children.”
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I’m sure that they will be taken care of very well. They won’t go wanting. Unlike a number of other people in similar circumstances who have been ignored by the malAdministration that Snow has been shilling for, for lo these many years, first on Faux News and then as a member of the malAdministration..
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BTW, are you “Publius @ Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 18:50:13 PM EDT” the former proprietor of the web site Legal Fiction and now of Obsidian Wings?
And I did not mean to imply, raj, that you were on the left. But most BMG readers and bloggers tend that way, and I was referring to them/us.
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Finally, yes, bereaved rich children are still rich. Whoopee.
Finally, yes, bereaved rich children are still rich. Whoopee.
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But I doubt very seriously that too many people cried for, for example, the children of Mussolini after he was executed by his countrymen.
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And, I suppose, some people are more “to-dust-worthy” than others. Especially people who have shilled for idiotic and oppressive politicians for years.
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Maybe the god that is apparently running this malAdministration is trying to tell them that it doesn’t particularly like what they are doing. Maybe they should pay heed.
Instead of using a Mussolini comparison, just compare Bush Administration employees to Hitler’s employees and put a Godwin-esque end to your thread.
…own scorn much??
Simple. I may be mistaken, but it appears that Mussolini had descendants, at least one of whom is–or was–serving in the Italian parliament. Hitler, of course, had no descendants. That’s why I referred to Mussolini.
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BTW, Godwin’s “law” is cute, but until I start calling you a Nazi–and I have no plans to–it doesn’t really apply.
my mind travels back to one of the first patients I took care of when I was a new registered nurse working on an on Oncology Unit at Mass. General Hospital. She was a 19 yo, newly married, from a fishing town on the southern MA coast. I’ll call her “Susie”. Neither Susie nor her husband had health insurance althougth they both worked full-time jobs putting in many more than 40 hours a week.
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Susie’s leg had hurt her for a while. She kept going to work. Her leg kept hurting. She started having trouble with the stairs up to thier 3rd floor walk-up apartment.
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Susie went to the local ER when she couldn’t make it up the stairs to her home one night after work. An x-ray revealed a large tumor, a sarcoma.
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I was one of Susie’s caregivers, “pushing” chemotherapy through a central line directly into the right chamber of her heart. And teaching her and her family about what to expect as far as side effects form her treatment, and how to take the anti-nausea meds, etc.
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As with many low-income people who are unlucky enough to develop cancer or some other severe illness, Susie’s cancer was diagnosed at a MUCH later stage and with a lower chance for survival than if she had been insured and sought care earlier. GGW, this is why I am such a bore with my “one-tune” posts about healthcare justice.
…on urgent need for healthcare justice — my wife’s research focuses on health care disparities, and she mostly treats low-income folks…
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you and i want to get to the same place, just have different views about best road to get there from here…
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if you promise to keep up your one-tune posts on health care i’ll promise to keep up my one-tune posts on K-12 đŸ™‚
R/T “different views about best road to get there from here…”
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and btw I look forward to more K-12 posts đŸ™‚
i don’t know. i have to read more of your posts!
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i don’t disagree with the goals of the health care amendment, but i believe if it were passed it would create more problems than it solves, so i oppose it.
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i think we should work feverishly to make the MA Plan work.
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if i were Governor, i’d be writing the heads of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Kaiser Family Foundation et al:
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Write ’em up separately and I’ll promote.
Well, you can have something to sell to “business,” but if you’re doing it right, PhRMA won’t like it one bit. And hey looky — a good chunk of our economy is pharma and biotech! Oops.
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What we’ve got to deal with now — emphatically, affirmatively, even radically — is costs. And while the rest of us are paying through the nose, someone has a Kleenex ready. People are getting extremely rich off of health care. I heard a doctor — a compassionate, dedicated professional, byt the sound of it, trying to get care and payment for her patients — in an NPR story saying how she made “only” $140k — much less than specialists. Why do the specialists make so much money? Isn’t $140K enough for just about anyone?
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As for drugs and devices, ask Boston Scientific if they’re happy about more information making the markets efficient.
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The next steps are going to piss people off — important, influential, well-organized, well-funded people. But there’s really no other way to get around it. Chapter 58 will likely fail — along with countless businesses, municipalities, retiree pension plans, and human bodies — unless we get damn tough on the special interests.
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Heck, I may make this into a post.
…I heard a doctor — a compassionate, dedicated professional, byt the sound of it, trying to get care and payment for her patients — in an NPR story saying how she made “only” $140k — much less than specialists. Why do the specialists make so much money? Isn’t $140K enough for just about anyone?
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a general practitioner needs to endure years of training at University and training hospitals just to become eligible to practice, oftentimes foregoing an income and ending up with the debt of a small house, if not a Mercedes Benz. A specialist needs to endure even more years of training, and ends up with an even larger debt.
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Is an annual average income of US$140K enough for someone who has foregone income for so long and assumed such a substantial debt? I don’t know. But it seems to me rather niggardly to want to deny them a better-than-decent income to repay them during their earning years for what they have foregone.
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Here in Germany, University is substantially free (that is, at no cost to the student, and that includes medical students), so at least they do not end up with the substantial debts that US medical students incur.
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I’ll leave Pharma for another day. There are rather substantial differences in pricing between Germany and the US, and I obviously do have some suppositions on why.
please keep humming it!
I don’t think it’s about left or right. I think it’s about having some class.
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Best wishes to Mr. Snow and his family form someone who’s been there.