Liz Cheney Spins Dover

“I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras. And I don’t understand sort of showing up with the White House Press Pool with photographers and asking family members if you can take pictures. That’s really hard for me to get my head around…It was a surprising way for the president to choose to do this.”

Is Liz Cheney freaking kidding?

Bush made a presidency (and, frankly, helped make this site) out of his military photo ops — co-opting the living, the injured and family members of the dead. And now, Cheney wants to spin his black-out on Dover and coffins as some kind of modesty or respect — rather than a cynical, stonewalling, reality-denying strategy to prevent Americans from intimately feeling the ultimate cost of his elective war?

You can fault Obama for his foreign policy but what his presence at Dover demonstrates clearly, in striking counterpoint to Dubya, is taking responsibility.

I’m interested in your take on the photo — a direct examination I sidestepped in the last post. Clearly though, Cheney has not interest in dealing with the dynamics of the scene from Delaware.

(photo: Saul Loeb/AFP. caption: US President Barack Obama walks off a C-17 airplane during the dignified transfer of Sergeant Dale R. Griffin of Terre Haute, Indiana, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, October 29, 2009. Obama traveled to the base to meet the plane carrying the bodies of 18 US personnel killed in Afghanistan on October 26, including Griffin.)