Bill O’Reilly trotted out Karl Rove tonight for a Republican twofer of absolving the Bush administration of any responsibility for the mess in Iraq – including invading the country under false pretenses in the first place – and blaming President Obama for all the problems.

You may recall that when O’Reilly questioned Dick Cheney about the value of the Iraq war, O’Reilly made it very clear he was not going to cast blame. O’Reilly said, “I mean, as Americans, we’re all in it together. We’re all in it together. It’s easy to finger point… I don’t want to do that.”

Well, for some reason, we’re not all in it together any more and O’Reilly is happy to finger point. Or more correctly, give Rove a platform to finger point and give the impression of agreeing.

Starting with MSNBC. O’Reilly told Rove, “Our pals over at MSNBC are blaming you and Bush for the whole thing. You know that. ‘We never should’ve gone there.' You know, ‘if we didn’t do it, we wouldn’t have this.’ …On and on.”

Oh, the indignity of someone holding a presidential administration for a war based on false pretenses and falsely rosy predictions of the outcome!

Rove was a model of shirking responsibility by pointing the “they did it, too!” finger. He sneered, “I noticed that the MSNBC crowd is not critical of the two Secretaries of State who served President Obama: Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry, both of whom voted for the authorization and the use of force against Iraq. I think it might be sort of selective outrage at the Republicans.”

O’Reilly slyly overstated the criticism of Bush in order to smack it down as crazy malicious. “Look, you have to understand what this is. The far left says that you and Bush and everybody involved with it did it on purpose. You knew there weren’t weapons of mass destruction and you said it anyway. That’s their – and they’re never gonna get out of that.”

“Yeah,” Rove readily agreed. “That’s an old argument that really we waste time on because people who, on the other side, who have looked at this same intelligence came to the same conclusion, including people like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton…

“And Bill O’Reilly!” O’Reilly said.

I seriously doubt Gore or Bill Clinton saw the “same intelligence” as Bush administration officials and I question what intelligence Hillary Clinton saw, given that she served on the Armed Services Committee, not the Intelligence Committee. But I’m nearly certain that O’Reilly never saw any of the intel. He merely fell for the sales pitch.

Yet O’Reilly was confident that he and Rove had it right now – and that they need to fight the wrongness of President Obama’s view. “Here’s why it’s important,” O’Reilly said. “Because President Obama is going to use that at some point to justify his inaction. And that’s where it brings us up to where we are now. You know that’s going to happen.”

You got that? President Obama’s assessment that the Bush administration should never have invaded Iraq in the first place is why he will do the wrong thing now.

Rove was down for that. In fact, he was ready to paint Iraq as an unqualified success under Bush and blame every problem on Obama. He said:

Obama has made a lot of mistakes in handling Iraq. He did not establish a relationship with Maliki that allowed him to use U.S. influence to keep – Remember, when Obama comes into office, the number two and number three slots in Iraq are held by Sunni and Kurds. So we had all of the religious elements. The cabinet included Christians. We had influence there and then that influence diminished as the president got less and less engaged, and I don’t just mean the absence of U.S. troops. I mean almost from the beginning, he did not remain engaged to influence the Iraqi leadership to move in the direction of modernization and removal of these sectarian feuds.That’s a big mistake and we’re reaping the whirlwind. 

O’Reilly joined the meme. He closed the segment by saying, “It’s his mess now! It’s his mess now and we’ll see what he does.”

Can there be any doubt that whatever Obama does, Fox will attack it and blame him for any and every difficulty that ensues?

Watch the maneuvering below.