Republican strategist Karl Rove on Saturday complained that President Barack Obama had “never said thank you” when GOP hopeful Mitt Romney acknowledged he was a U.S. citizen.

Speaking to the hosts of Fox & Friends, Rove defended Romney’s recent suggestion that the president’s birth certificate might not be real as just a “bad joke.”

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“He got a good laugh out of it,” Rove explained. “This is faux outrage on the part of the Obama campaign. There was a period of time for the basic part of a year and a half when all these people — Rick Perry, Donald Trump and others — were out there saying Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The White House was completely quiet about it because they just wanted to egg the Republicans on — these Republicans sort of out there on the fringe — to say these kinds of things because it was so self-discrediting.”

“The one guy, who consistently said — dismissed 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, Gov. Romney, for acknowledging this and for defending President Obama,'” Rove added. “They certainly never gave any acknowledgement, were never gracious to the one guy who stood up and said, ‘This is all B.S., he was born in Honolulu, we all know that.’ And that was Mitt Romney.”

Watch this video from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, broadcast Aug. 25, 2012.

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(h/t: Media Matters)