Liz Cheney Scolded on Countdown For Criticizing Obama’s Casket Photo-Op
Was President Obama’s trip to Dover Air Force Base early Thursday morning to salute the caskets of 18 dead American soldiers as they were returned to American soil from Afghanistan a moment of presidential piety, or an irresistible photo-op? And could it have been both?
Liz Cheney introduced that line of questioning on John Gibson‘s Fox News Radio show on Thursday afternoon when she said “I don’t understand showing up with the White House press pool with photographers and asking family members if you can take pictures,” adding that President Bush used to participate in similar rituals but “without the cameras.”
Cheney’s remarks were replayed throughout MSNBC’s programming on Friday evening, most pointedly on Countdown, where guest host Lawrence O’Donnell pushed back against Cheney at length.
O’Donnell was certainly right to fact-check Cheney’s radio remarks, mentioning that in Bush’s time there was a moratorium on press coverage of military caskets. But things turned awkward when O’Donnell stared into the camera and addressed several rhetorical questions to Liz Cheney by name: “Hey, Liz: Have you ever lost a relative in battle? I have. My cousin Johnny, West Point graduate just like his father before him …
I wish the president and vice president had met his casket on the way home. You know what never means, Liz. It means zero. it means in over seven years and two wars, your dad never left the comfort of his White House office or the Vice President’s mansion and got himself up to Dover to bear witness to how his war-mongering fell on families of dead American soldiers — never, not once. Liz, don’t let your dad do this to you. Don’t let him parade you onto the stage to defend the indefensible. Let him suffer the full weight of the shame that we know he must feel when he watches Barack Obama do what he never had the decency to do.
That level of gravitas and emotion from O’Donnell over relatively brief radio remarks — which certainly didn’t break the mold of expected partisan punditry — was surprising. We’re shocked that he was shocked. It was no surprise, however, that O’Donnell invited former Countdown guest host Richard Wolffe on to, by and large, agree with everything he said and turn the casket photo-op issue into a character debate, mentioning Cheney’s five Vietnam draft deferments and the latest about Plamegate.
