White House Destroys Karl Rove Over Hillary Comment By Bringing Up Election Night 2012

On Tuesday, during his press briefing, White House Press Secretary absolutely torched Republican strategist and Fox News contributor Karl Rove over his recent comments about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Last week, Rove repeatedly insisted during a conference that Clinton suffered a ‘traumatic brain injury’ and that she spent a month in the hospital recovering from the injury. He insinuated that she was suffering from brain damage and that this, combined with her age, made it reasonable to question her ability to be President. On Tuesday morning, after dealing with blowback from his comments, he insisted on Fox News that he wasn’t claiming that she had brain damage, but that it is fair to question her age and health.

Anyway, while holding his briefing, Carney was asked by a member of the press corps if the White House was aware of any health issues that afflicted Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Carney got off the following zinger in response to the question:

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

“Dr. Rove might have been the last person in America on election night to acknowledge and recognize that the President won reelection, including the state of Ohio, so we’ll leave it at that.” 

Boom! Carney should have just followed that up with “Good night!” and dropped the microphone. As pretty much everybody in America knows by now, Rove had an epic meltdown live on Fox News during Election Night coverage in 2012. He didn’t want to believe the network’s own projection that Ohio was going to President Obama. He kept claiming that there was a possibility that Ohio could swing for Mitt Romney and that the statisticians that called it for Obama were premature. Eventually, anchor Megyn Kelly asked Rove, “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?”

Below is video of Rove’s entire temper tantrum, where he forced network executives to send Megyn Kelly back to the decision desk to explain why they called the election for President Obama. Even after the people in charge pointed out the methodology used, Rove still didn’t want to believe them.

Seriously, you’d think with that footage laying around, Rove would have slithered away, never to be heard from again. Besides his embarrassing performance on Election Night, he also went out and wasted tons of money on losing candidates that election cycle. In 2012, his SuperPACs provided almost no actual results, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars donated by extremely wealthy Republicans to get candidates elected. In fact, the Sunlight Foundation calculated that there was only a 1 percent success rate on the $100 million worth of ads that American Crossroads paid for. His other SuperPAC, Crossroads GPS, had a ‘better’ success rate, but it was still an abysmal 14% on the $70 million spent on attack ads.

Nearly two years later, he’s still the butt of jokes and getting trolled by Jay Carney. It might be a good idea for Rove to sit the next couple of plays out, perhaps stop talking for a while.

Justin Baragona

Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).