Michelle Obama flew to New York to see a World Series game. Her husband, late at night, went to be in attendance as the bodies of US servicemen killed in Aghanistan were off-loaded at a military base.
Maureen Dowd, writing her regular op-ed piece in The New York Times,on this occasion not being acerbic, contrasts the two trips and what confronts Obama, the President:
"But it was also a genuinely poignant moment. It is how we want our presidents to behave, doing the humane thing especially when it’s hard. And Obama, who called it “a sobering reminder” of sacrifices made, signaled to Americans that he will resist blinders as he grapples with the byzantine, seemingly bottomless conflicts he inherited.
Leave it to Liz Cheney, in her continuing bid to out-Cheney her scary dad, to suggest that Obama is a crass publicity-seeker.
“I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras,” she told a Fox News radio host.
She’s right: There were no press cameras at Dover in the previous administration. There was also no W.
While Bush occasionally visited the wounded and the families of those killed, he never went to Dover to salute the fallen. And he barred any media coverage of it, trying to airbrush the evidence that the wars he started were not the cakewalks he had promised. He did not attend a single funeral. It reflected an emotional and spiritual smallness typical of his administration, like Donald Rumsfeld signing letters to families of dead troops with an autopen and Paul Wolfowitz understating the number of war dead."
Maureen Dowd, writing her regular op-ed piece in The New York Times,on this occasion not being acerbic, contrasts the two trips and what confronts Obama, the President:
"But it was also a genuinely poignant moment. It is how we want our presidents to behave, doing the humane thing especially when it’s hard. And Obama, who called it “a sobering reminder” of sacrifices made, signaled to Americans that he will resist blinders as he grapples with the byzantine, seemingly bottomless conflicts he inherited.
Leave it to Liz Cheney, in her continuing bid to out-Cheney her scary dad, to suggest that Obama is a crass publicity-seeker.
“I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras,” she told a Fox News radio host.
She’s right: There were no press cameras at Dover in the previous administration. There was also no W.
While Bush occasionally visited the wounded and the families of those killed, he never went to Dover to salute the fallen. And he barred any media coverage of it, trying to airbrush the evidence that the wars he started were not the cakewalks he had promised. He did not attend a single funeral. It reflected an emotional and spiritual smallness typical of his administration, like Donald Rumsfeld signing letters to families of dead troops with an autopen and Paul Wolfowitz understating the number of war dead."
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