If you’re going to criticize someone for mourning the dead improperly, at least get your facts straight.
CNN contributor Kayleigh McEnany caused a collective eye-roll this week when she claimed former President Barack Obama went on a golfing junket immediately after the death of Daniel Pearl. It’s not true, of course — Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter was captured and killed in Pakistan by terrorists in 2002. (Obama was a state Senator in Illinois at that time.) She meant to refer to another American who was beheaded, James Foley.
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The moment occurred as CNN’s Don Lemon questioned McEnany how she can defend President Trump’s many golf outings when she attacked Obama for the same thing.
“You said, ‘Things that offend Obama: Work outside the golf course.’ And you said, ‘DNC in four words: Find a golf course.’ And then you said, ‘President is annoyed. He just left a golf course and is counting down the minutes until he can go back,'” Lemon said. “I mean, you’ve tweeted about it.”
McEnany responded, “And I’ll tell you why. Because, when President Bush took time off from the golf course in honor of the Iraq War, you had President Obama, who after the, I believe it was the beheading of Daniel Pearl, spoke to how upset he was about that and then rushed off to a golf game.”
Oddly enough, not a single person on that five-person CNN panel thought to correct her factually inaccurate remark.
McEnany apologized eventually for the false statement, saying on social media, “I apologize for using the wrong name. Both James Foley and Daniel Pearl lost their lives to terrorism & should be honored by our leaders.”
Foley was kidnapped in 2012 by the Islamic State, and beheaded two years later.
For the record, Obama did go golfing immediately after reacting to Foley’s death. The former president said later that he sort of regretted the decision.
“It is always a challenge when you’re supposed to be on vacation,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“There’s no doubt that, after having talked to the families, where it was hard for me to hold back tears listening to the pain that they were going through, after the statement that I made, that you know, I should’ve anticipated the optics,” he said.
“You know, that’s part of the job,” he added, saying, he was not always the best versed in the “theater” of the presidency. “It’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I’m mindful of that.”
