Oh, dear. I meant to be making fun of myself with the rudeness bit... (It's getting really bad... for real.. I'm going to stop reading that damn book for at least a month now.)
And what I meant was that "wasn't a nice guy" didn't cover it nearly enough! I started to think about what exactly it was that got him in Voldy's inner circle. It's never stated in the books, but for all we know, Snape was a cold-blooded murderer. Now, we could hope that he just used his cunning to make it SEEM like he was... spreading rumors and such... but he could easily been murdering with the best of them out of unexpressed rage and anger.