Rove attacks Obama for not offering Bush enough praise.

No matter what Obama does, it seems he can't please anyone here. Rachell Maddow thought that he should never have given any praise to Bush at all.

"To talk about him having a demonstrated commitment to our security, having started this war on the terms on which he started it, -- I mean, it's beyond restraint from President Obama and anyone in the pro-Iraq war, pro-Bush camp who doesn't feel like they've been given the greatest political present they never deserved was not listening to this speech," she concluded.

I found that comment slightly unfair. Obama is doing what president's are supposed to do and is trying to unite the country after a war which he disagreed with.

But Karl Rove heard something else:

Rove: I learned a long time ago, that when a politician says "no one can doubt" they're trying to raise questions and suggest that there was a doubt.

[...]

I thought it was an attempt at graciousness, but it didn't succeed.

It defies belief that Rove can seek to find fault when Obama could have repeated his belief that this was a bad war which should simply never have been fought.

He accuses Obama of "an attempt at graciousness", but Rove makes no attempt at all at being gracious.

But even Rove isn't as offensive as Ari Fleischer who states that, had Churchill been listened to, WWII could have been avoided and with it the Holocaust.

Fleischer: And I thought to myself, if the world had listened to Churchill in '38, people probably would have said, "You exaggerated the threat of Hitler. Who says there is a world war coming?" We'll never know what we averted by getting rid of Saddam and how many lives were saved.

This was a trait of the Bush administration, to demand praise for things which never happened. We saw it in the way Republicans insisted Bush was to be thanked that the US never got attacked again on the mainland since 9-11.

And we now see the most ridiculous example of this mindset. Taking out Saddam might have prevented a Holocaust. According to this "logic" no policy can ever be wrong, as who can say what would have happened had the administration not behaved in the way which it did.

Tags: Obama, Karl Rove, Iraq war