By Stephen C. Webster
In the world of former Bush political adviser Karl Rove, "eggheads from academia" are either good or bad, depending on which position seems most opportune: even if it's one, then the other mere moments later.
That's the take-away from a Friday Fox News segment which featured Rove falsely claiming the president has not consulted with any experts on the Gulf oil gusher.
"There are plenty of very smart petroleum engineering professors in America’s great colleges and universities he could meet with," Rove said, just before attacking Obama as lacking "the experience" to make "executive decisions."
Then, after advocating meet-ups with college professors and calling America's colleges "great," he made a startling reversal.
"[Obama has] populated his administration with people just like him, eggheads from academia who have no practical working knowledge of how the American economy works or what ordinary families face in their daily lives, and the disconnect simply is growing."
Rove's claim that Obama has not been briefed by experts on the matter is transparently false.
Obama was briefed on the destructive potential of the Gulf oil gusher the day that Deepwater Horizon sank to the bottom of the sea. He has since pledged "every resource" to aid out-of-work Gulf coast residents, whose jobs have been put on hold by a moratorium on underwater drilling and a massive fishing ban put in place to help keep BP's spilled oil from entering the human food chain.
He further dispatched a team of America's brightest scientific minds, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, to aid BP engineers in plugging the gusher and to speak with the company on the president's behalf.
Rove's odd criticism springs from recent attacks on Obama for not having met BP CEO Tony Hayward. He cited the White House calendar, noting that Obama's meeting with BP officials had yet to happen. A meeting between BP officials and senior administration personnel had been scheduled at time of this writing; both President Obama and Hayward were expected to participate.
The White House has emphasized: "BP will be paying for all costs of stopping the spill and cleaning it up, and we will aggressively pursue full compensation for damages."
It would not seem to matter to Rove -- who never graduated from college -- what President Obama says or does on the matter: either way he'll cast the president as wrong, even if he has to contradict himself from one breath to the next.
This video is from Fox News, broadcast Friday June 11, 2010, as snipped by Think Progress.
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