Bill O'Reilly and Liz Cheney sparred over the Iraq War on O'Reilly's Thursday show.
Cheney was on to promote the memoir she co-wrote with father Dick Cheney. O'Reilly, however, started by noting that the former vice president had never agreed to an interview. "I don't believe he likes me very much," he said. "I'm a little perplexed."
"Am I chopped liver?" Cheney responded in rather surprising Borscht Belt style.
O'Reilly said that the Bush administration had left "two big deficits": the economy and Iraq. He wondered why the administration was so "taken by surprise" when the subprime market collapsed. Liz Cheney said that it was Democrats' fault for not regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The conversation then turned to Iraq. O'Reilly played the infamous footage of Cheney saying the U.S. would be "greeted as liberators." Liz Cheney said that this had, in fact, happened.
"Here's why you're wrong," O'Reilly said. "We weren't greeted as liberators. We were greeted in a way that was tentative."
"That's not true," Cheney said. "Yes it is," he replied. He asked her if she knew how many people were present when Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down.
"Do you know how many, Bill?" Cheney asked. "Yes, I do," he said. "A couple hundred ... Baghdad is a city of millions."
Cheney wondered what O'Reilly would have done. "Talked to Saddam?" she scoffed. He said he would have gone the "elder Bush" route and "strangled" Iraq with a blockade. She disagreed with this approach.
"I don't expect you and your father to agree with me, OK?" O'Reilly concluded. "But the blood and treasure that the United States spent in Iraq has now come back to our country in a very negative way."