We had the good news Monday. Tony Snow is back in the saddle. It is good to have him back.

The bad news is that try as he might, he cannot humanize the uncouth odious man he must speak for. Yesterday the resident president vetoed the appropriations bill sent to him by the Congress of the United States. His reasons for the veto, he said, were to prevent the “politicians in Washington, DC” from “micromanaging” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he signed the bill, he said, “the enemy will mark their calendars” and wait until our troops come home before causing total havoc.

In a vote today, the house vote fell short of the required two thirds required to override the presidential veto.

Today, after meeting George W. Bush to discuss writing a new bill, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the press that Mr. Bush “has a deaf ear for the voice of the American people and a blind eye to the war on the ground.”

Today I read an article by Susan Estrich, former Governor Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager during his presidential run against George Herbert Walker Bush. Her opponent in that race, the infamous Lee Atwater, was Karl Christian Rove’s hero, perhaps mentor. Ms. Estrich knows her way around the low life of presidential politics as well as the noble aspirations of some of its practitioners.

She brings us more bad news:

“Four years ago, after his triumphant landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the president, violating every superstitious rule my mother ever taught me about speaking too soon, announced that our mission was accomplished.

“Four years later, 175,000 American troops are on the ground, there are more than five times as many Sunni insurgents as there were four years ago, and we have just ended one of the deadliest months of the long war.

“Are we better off now than we were four years ago? Are the Iraqis?”

I think it is obvious to almost every adult American and Englishman, and probably most children, that this war was perpetrated by liars. Not by “mistaken men of good will,” but by devious and panic stricken liars.

Ms. Estrich is a bit more charitable to the man:

“At a certain point, a leader can be so profoundly wrong, so completely isolated, so totally out of touch with the people he is supposed to govern that he is no longer deserving of respect, even for the office he holds. This is where George now stands.

“It is not only the war that is a failure, but also his presidency.”

It is my firm belief that Messrs. Bush and Cheney are unindicted co-conspiritors. Unindicted now. Poor Tony Snow.

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