If you’re Bill O’Reilly, now would be a pretty good time to hire a new PR guy. That, at least, was the first thought to cross my mind when I encountered this headline:”Welcome Tony Snow to the Factor Family!”

Indeed, President Bush’s former press secretary, Tony Snow, was officially hired yesterday by Bill O’Reilly’s syndicated radio show, “Radio Factor,” but not in any public relations capacity. Instead, Snow will serve as O’Reilly’s “permanent fill-in host.”

In a way, that’s even more intriguing. Where’s Bill-O going? Is he expecting to take a little hiatus, as some of his critics have been suggesting?

No, of course not; O’Reilly isn’t going anywhere. In fact, his producer, David Tabacoff, even defended O’Reilly’s suggestion of going after Michelle Obama with a lynch mob yesterday, insisting that “what Bill said was an obvious repudiation of anyone attacking Michelle Obama…As he has said more than ten times, he is giving her the benefit of the doubt.”

It’s no surprise, really, that FOX is unconcerned with O’Rielly’s recent remarks. But the timing of Snow’s hiring is almost as ironic as Keith Olberman’s use of a Bush quote (”Some Americans do not understand the effect that references to nooses and lynching can still have”) to lambaste O’Reilly for his reference to lynching.