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Liz Cheney MSNBC Middle East Expert |
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To analyze the history  making speech President Obama made in Cairo CNN had Christiane Amanpour, Robin Wright, who wrote Dreams and Shadows a book on the Middle East, Hussein Rashid, professor Religious Dispatches.Org. Plus CNN offered several interviews with professors at Lebanon University, and on site interviews with people in Egypt. CNN put together a very responsible and knowledgeable post speech feed-back group.
So who were the middle-east experts that MSNBC trotted out to give their analysis of the President’s historic speech on their “Morning Joe” show? Adding to their usual cast, consisting of “stunningly superficial” Joe Scarborough, his sycophantic co-host Mika Brzezinski, silly Willie Guise, financial expert Gilbert Radigan, Richard Haas, and the featured analyst was none other than world-renown middle-eastern expert Liz Cheney.
Drawing on the same vast knowledge of the middle-east that her father drew on to wrongfully predict that “they will greet us with flowers,” which led to the super debacle from which we are still working to recover, Liz Cheney offered her analysis of President Obama’s speech.
She began by saying that she thought it was a well delivered speech but she felt it “missed some fundamental points.” What she followed with was the same old one sided alignment with Israel, the same demonizing of Iran that was characteristic of the successful Bush Cheney foreign policy which got us nowhere except to generate increased enmity toward America in the Arab/Muslim world and make Iran stronger by removing Iraq as a counterbalancing force.
According to Liz Cheney, the President should not have used the phrase “on the other hand” to go from talking about the suffering of Jews in the holocaust to talking about sixty years of occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, saying it suggested a moral equivalency. In choosing to minimize the plight of the Palestinians, Liz exposed the kind of thinking that prevailed during the Bush Cheney administration, which eliminated any semblance of the United States acting as honest peace brokers.
She objected to there being a straightforward acknowledgement by the President of the fact that we participated in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. This is another example of the kind of bankrupt foreign policy that her father promoted which extolled the greatness and infallibility of the United States as they committed one international blunder after another with the whole world watching the bungling self-defeating performance.
Liz Cheney is pushing daddy’s same failed philosophy that was rejected by the voters. At one point in her analysis, she stated that our allies are more concerned about Iran and that President Obama is making a mistake in prioritizing the peace process. Here again she harkened back to the failed Bush Cheney policy of deferring to the current Israeli leadership, adopting the Netanyahu argument, and suggesting she has more insight into the thinking of our allies than the President.
Undoubtedly, Liz Cheney is holding high level meetings with world leaders who are confiding in her and not the President of the United States. She explained that our allies would rather we project the same kind of attitude of the Bush years in dealing with Iran and that Obama’s approach is naïve, not withstanding the rave notices and warm reception the President speech received around the world.
The question is why is MSNBC providing this woman a platform to repeat the same tired perspective and distortions her father offered which successfully screwed up the country? And why is MSNBC attempting to elevate Liz Cheney as the counterpart to the President of the United States allowing her to deliver her voter-rejected observations without being challenged or denounced by anyone on the “Morning Joe” show? What’s up with that?
That the “Morning Joe” people are comfortable in having Liz Cheney appear regularly on their show to spew her daddy’s roundly rejected perspective is more a comment on MSNBC and “Morning Joe” than Liz Cheney. We have heard this stuff in baritone for eight years, and the voters rejected it. Does the soprano version make it any less ridiculous?
As fate would have it, it’s like MSNBC caught a Liz Cheney virus, A few hours later, there was Liz again, on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC afternoon segment, offering her warmed over I-know-what’s-best-for-America analysis of the Presidents speech, in case you missed the “Morning Joe” rendition.
After playing a video excerpt of the President’s speech, Andrea Mitchell began the interview with a nervous giggle as she asked Liz Cheney almost apologetically “you heard the President what’s your reaction?” Liz was happy to rehash the criticisms she had offered earlier on “Morning Joe.”
At one point Liz took a shot at some revisionist history which is a regular part of her television appearances. She informed Andrea Mitchell that her father and the Bush administration never tried to connect 9-11 to Sadam Hussein. Andrea Mitchell was noticeably taken aback as she attempted to correct the record and get Liz straight.
Like CNN’s Anderson Cooper Andrea Mitchell was no match for Liz. One thing the Cheneys seem to be good at is calmly lying and daring their interviewers to dispute them. Andrea read a recent Dick Cheney quote and offered that Dick Cheney was pulling back from his earlier statements connecting 9-11 with Saddam Hussein. Liz was having none of that talk. She said not so, and went on to explain that he never claimed there was a Bin Laden connection.
One would have thought that Andrea ’s staff could have been more prepared or quick on their control room response and would have dug up one of several existing video clips to impeach Liz Cheney’s claim that her father had not connected 9-11 to Saddam Hussein. How long does it take to push a button to pull up a “Meet The Press” archive clip. But no, Liz ran circles around Andrea to the extent that Andrea begged off with the proverbial egg all over her face, saying, “I’ll have to do my home work and invite you back..”
Less we take solace in the thought that at least the other cable news shows have not succumbed to this ridiculous “let’s put Liz Cheney on to criticize the President” phenomena, brace yourselves. It’s either contagious or competition kicked in. A few hours later there was the ubiquitous in-demand Liz Cheney on CNN with Wolf Blitzer to once again posture and pontificate on what she found “troubling” about the President’s historic speech.
So what we have here is Dick Cheney’s surrogate being irresponsibly sought out by cable news shows to share the same misguided demonstrably self-destructive thinking we were subjected to when they were in charge. MSNBC needs to be reminded that we don’t have to speculate about how smart is this Cheney brain trust. We’ve seen what can only be described as their judgment/stupidity in action for eight years. We saw its long term planning and its crisis management. None of it worked except to drive America “into a ditch.”
We also saw that the Bush Cheney folk had absolutely no integrity which was clearly demonstrated by their concocting a lie to invade a country. We also saw that contrary to the pious concern that the Cheneys are now expressing for the sanctity of the CIA and our national security, that when it served their nefarious interest they trampled all over our national security and the CIA to expose Valerie Palme simply to get back at Ambassador Joe Wilson who was trying to serve America responsibly and not have us go to war for no reason..
This is a family that has no problem with the practice of prevarication. It led to the needless loss of more than 4,000 American lives and over 100,000 Iraqis, not to mention the thousands of maimed and impaired who now have to try and live normal lives. Iran, the declared main cog in the axis of evil, has been strengthened and emboldened. They picked a war and then totally mismanaged it. They were confronted with an American crisis—Katrina, and screwed that up.
What these cable news shows are doing with the Cheneys needs to be put in context.If there is one person who can be charged with the responsibility for doing the most damage to this country and bestowing the most enduring debacle on the American people over the last eight years, it’s Dick Cheney. To see MSNBC and CNN seeking out the advice of his daughter to articulate and regurgitate that same discredited way of thinking and policy making and pit it against our current president as if this is some sort of parlor game is reprehensible and should be seen for what it is.
Our president is in the process of trying to clean up the mess left by this one man wrecking crew. Choosing to offer legitimacy to a family that has done so much harm to this country, raises serious questions about the motives of these news agencies, leaving one with the ultimate question, whose side are you on?
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