Karl Rove Trashes Maureen Dowd: "Bitter, Twisted, Deranged Columnist"

Karl Rove slammed Maureen Dowd for trashing former President Bush in her latest column on President Obama's leisure time.

"I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for the New York Times who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for anybody on the conservative side of the aisle," the Bush adviser and Fox News contributor said in an interview with Fox News' Martha MacCallum. "I actually went to an editorial board meeting at the New York Times and wasted a couple bucks on some flowers to give Maureen Dowd at the meeting so that it would give her a smile on her face. And that didn't even work. This is a dour, downbeat liberal."

Dowd wrote Wednesday:

With two wars and G.M. in bankruptcy proceedings, shouldn't the president be glued to the grindstone, emulating W.'s gravity when he sacrificed golf in 2003 as the Iraq insurgency spread?

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," the former president explained later. "I think, you know, playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Actually, what sends the wrong signal is going to war with a phony justification, inadequate troop levels, insufficient armor, an inept Defense secretary and an inability to admit for years, deadly ones, that you needed counterinsurgency experts.

Rove did acknowledge that Dowd's most recent column was "entertaining" and said that while he admires her writing, "she is a very nasty, snarky person."

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