Yesterday three top White House officials — David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett — blamed the Bush administration for some of the country’s current problems during appearances on the Sunday morning news shows. Today, Karl Rove — a Fox News contributor and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush — hit back.
“What gets me is that every member of the Obama high command feels obligated to beginning with a gratuitous and misleading slap at their predecessor,” Rove said on Fox News this morning.
Of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s assertion that the Obama administration is asking tough questions for the first time on Afghanistan — and that the Bush administration was thinking “always about Iraq” — Rove said: “What world has he been living in?”
“Every American saw the progress that we made in Afghanistan,” Rove said. “This administration, the new administration, President Obama’s administration is not the first to deal with this problem.”
And this:
It’s really amazing, Mr. Emanuel left the impression that they were the first people to ask tough questions. That’s simply not true.
Rove said that in fact, the Bush administration prepared a strategic review of the war in Afghanistan last year and — in conjunction with the Obama transition team — didn’t release it publicly, but handed it to the Obama team instead.
“Literally the Obama transition team and the Bush White House agreed that that report would not be issued by President Bush and his administration but instead would be handed over so President Obama would have time to look at it and adopt it.”
And, saying that the White House’s mixed messages on the Afghan election were weakening the war effort, Rove had one last shot:
“It’s really unusual that this administration is so quick to criticize the Bush administration when they are really destabilizing the regime in Afghanistan in a fundamental way.”
Late Update: Here’s the video.
