Former President Barack Obama pulled a "political drive-by shooting" this past weekend with his criticism of the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic during his virtual commencement speech, former White House adviser Karl Rove said Monday.
“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 told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "This is a moment where these young graduates could be inspired to a life of service, to recognize that life is going to bring challenges and how we handle the challenges is going to demonstrate our character. There are lots of positive messages that the former president could have delivered."
Obama on Saturday told college graduates in his online commencement address that the pandemic revealed that many officials "aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
He named neither President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence in the speech but said that "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. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
Rove said Monday that Obama did not only slander Trump and Pence, but everyone else involved in the federal response, including Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the members of the Army who erected the Javits Center field hospital, the Navy after sending its ships to Los Angeles and New York — "all of these people in charge of responding to this."
"We're getting lectured by a guy whose administration depleted the national strategic stockpile of N95 masks after a previous smaller pandemic and didn't replenish it and he's sitting here lecturing the current president by just in a blanket condemnation of everybody whose been involved in this," said Rove.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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