If there's one thing we can count on from old Turdblossom and his buddies over at Faux "news" it's that their audience will always be treated to a big whopping dose of revisionist history as they were on this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report.
While discussing President Obama's poll numbers with host Paul Gigot, Karl Rove of course did his best to attempt to deflect laying any blame at the feet his former boss, George W. Bush for his similarly low numbers (we've heard this before from Rove). Nope, those were all the fault of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans. And then there was also that pesky little thing called a war he mentioned as well, which of course wasn't his boss's fault either.
GIGOT: You were in the White House in the sixth year which had low approval ratings somewhere close to this president's. How do you see this president's standing compared to previous presidents at this stage in his term?
ROVE: Well, the sixth year is a terrible time to be in the White House. It's like going to the proctologist each day. It's not pleasant at all and President Obama has bad numbers, just as President Bush did. But I think these are fundamentally different situations, circumstances.
GIGOT: How so?
ROVE: Well, President Bush first of all suffered from Katrina, you know, an uncontrollable event, largest storm to hit America in recorded modern history and the failure of local units of government who have the principle responsibility of dealing with the aftermath of disasters was blamed on him and rather than spending his time pointing his finger at the governor of Louisiana or the mayor of New Orleans, he just accepted responsibility and jumped in.
And second of all, we had an active ongoing war in Iraq that was not going well at all and until the surge was announced after the 2006 elections, things began to turn around in 2007 and 2008, but... (crosstalk)
GIGOT: What is it about the president's standing right now, that if you were in the White House, you would say, “Alright Mr. President we need to address?”
ROVE: Yeah, some of these are self-inflicted. I think the tone is really bad out of the White House. I don't understand why the president believes that whenever he gets into difficulty, the answer is to dig deeper into the partisanship of the moment. The president I think, any president is bigger when they rise above partisanship, and this president when he gets into difficulty like he is in now, turns and becomes an even more harsh partisan. We saw it earlier this week when the president went to The Key Bridge in Washington DC to push for his answer to the highway funding bill.
We have not had a highway funding bill here for six years and he's trying to get one using pay-fors that clearly have been unacceptable since the time he came into office. He's proposed these same sets of tax increases for to fund a variety of things and they've never gone anywhere. So... but rather than talking about it and trying to find common ground he goes out and excoriates the Republicans, saying my proposals are not socialism, it's factual...
GIGOT: Right.
ROVE: … so sue me. The language is just unduly harsh.
Yes, that's the reason for Obama's low poll numbers. He hasn't adequately kissed the obstructionist Republicans' in the Congress butts and he said some mean things about how they've refused to govern and hurt their tender feelings.
Rove went onto try to downplay the damage the GOP has done to themselves with Hispanic and Latino voters with their nasty rhetoric on immigration reform and claimed it's not going to harm them too badly in the midterm elections. I don't know why anyone would ask the likes of Rove to make predictions about any upcoming elections given his track record, but let's hope he's proven wrong about Republicans gaining control of the Congress.
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