It was bad enough that Karl Rove had the chutzpah to “defend” Mitt Romney’s birther joke by attacking President Obama as “ungracious” for not thanking Romney for acknowledging Obama was born in the U.S. I mean, what’s next? Rove attacking Obama for not being grateful that nobody on Fox has called him the n-word? But within the same spiel, Rove admitted that it was to Romney’s advantage not to be “so self discrediting” by going birther.

Rove conjectured (but presented it as fact) that when Donald Trump and others were questioning Obama’s birth certificate, the Obama campaign was silent because it wanted to “egg on” the Republican birthers because they were “so self discrediting.” But now, Rove said, it’s a different story! That, he argued, was proof that the current complaints about Romney were nothing but faux outrage.

But actually the faux outrage was Rove’s. Without missing a beat, he turned Romney’s decision not to be “self discrediting” into an act of magnanimity that the ungrateful President Obama did not have the graciousness to appreciate. Rove said:

The one guy who consistently said, ‘Dismiss this’ and defended the president as having been born in the United States, in the middle of a contentious primary, was Mitt Romney and the White House never said, ‘Thank you, Governor Romney for, you know, acknowledging this and for defending President Obama.’ But let him make a funny joke that was more about himself than President Obama and the White House, you know, sort of bristles up and the campaign sort of bristles up and they send out Mr. LaBolt to say, ‘Shame on you.’ This is faux outrage and we ought to accept it for what it is which is the president campaign is hypocritical… They certainly never, you know, gave any acknowledgment, were never gracious to the one guy who stood up and said, ‘This is all BS. He was born in Honolulu, we all know that.’ And that was Mitt Romney.”

By the way, just moments before Rove called the birther joke “funny,” he had written on his white board that it was a “bad joke.”