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Karl Rove‘s choice of language on Monday was being scrutinized after he used some loaded words to describe President Barack Obama‘s address to the 2020 graduates of historically Black colleges and universities. During his virtual speech that was given online because of the coronavirus social distancing guidelines, Obama used some phrasing that hurt Republicans’ feelings to the point they apparently felt the need to dispatch Rove for an unofficial response.
Obama never mentioned Donald Trump‘s name once during his speech, but he did list some qualities that fit the president’s description to a tee. He specifically pointed to the coronavirus crisis as proof of ineptitude at the highest levels of government.
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” said on Saturday afternoon. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
That part.
Trump immediately threw a Twitter tantrum, retweeting his supporters’ claims that the Obama administration was worse than the current one is. After his new press secretary with a checkered past of her own pushed back on Obama’s apparently truthful statement, Rove, the Fox News pundit, took to the airwaves on Monday to use some not uncertain terms in pushing back against Obama.
“It is so unseemly for a former president to take the virtual commencement ceremony for a series of historically black colleges and universities and turn it into a political drive-by shooting,” Rove said while using racially loaded language. Rove went on to imply that Obama’s words to HBCU graduates were not “positive messages” and “slandered” Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Of course, Rove conveniently made no mention of Trump’s recent efforts to criminalize Obama for a fictional “Obamagate” crime that even Attorney General Bob Barr said on Monday he has no expectations for those claims to be investigated.
Instead, Rove used the criminal language of a “drive-by shooting” to associate Obama with.
It was all by racist design, if history can serve as any indication. And it does.
Who can forget the time when Rove was accused of starting a so-called whisper campaign during the 2000 presidential campaign alleging then-candidate Arizona Sen. John McCain had an illegitimate Black daughter? McCain had an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, Rove denied it, but the move worked and gave eventual President George W. Bush the cushion he needed to seal the Republican nomination.
Twenty years later and it seems that Rove is up to his old racist tricks again.
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
‘HBCU Edition’: The Obamas’ Graduation Special To Honor 2020 Black College Graduates
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