Granted, the hiring of Tony Snow to be the White House Press Secretary makes sense when you realize that George Bush also referred to Harriet Miers as “a superb choice”, but this part of the President’s announcement has me scratching my head :

He’s not afraid to express his own opinions. For those of you who have read his columns and listened to his radio show, he sometimes has disagreed with me. I asked him about those comments, and he said, “You should have heard what I said about the other guy.” I like his perspective, I like the perspective he brings to this job, and I think you’re going to like it, too.

Doesn’t this seem like the kind of qualities that you should try to avoid when hiring a press secretary? That job isn’t about expressing opinions, but communicating the positions of the White House. Yeah, I should probably throw in a cheap Fox News joke here, but I won’t. Then again, I guess I just did.

But anyways, the truly fascinating thing about all of this (other than Snow being a journalist who completely sold out by joining the other side) is Snow’s flirtations with Bush criticism. Looking through the list of quotes posted by Think Progress, I can’t help but think that you could make a similar list from the works of just about any conservative columnist. Proclamations of the sort that Snow is credited with are pretty common among conservative pundits who want to prove their conservative bona fides in the face of the big government, free spending ways of their chosen leaders. The fact that Snow once wrote “George Bush has become something of an embarrassment” says less about the President than Snow himself. That Snow would go out of his way to distance himself from Bush yet would still support the guy (as evidenced by today’s announcement) says to me that Snow’s Dubya bashing was motivated less by his devotion to conservative principles than his inability or unwillingness to defend the President in the face of enormous unpopularity. Since defending the Bush is his job now, it’ll be interesting to see how well Snow does.