On Wednesday, President Barack Obama invoked the recent horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School as one of the reasons why he believes Republicans should compromise with him in budget talks. Following his controversial comments, conservative commentator and columnist Charles Krauthammer derided the invocation of the tragedy, calling it “sacrilege.”

“The president invoking a massacre of children to essentially say the Republicans need to accept his terms of surrender in the negations is not just a non-sequitur, I think it’s a sacrilege,” the commentator said during a Fox News appearance.

After dismissing Obama’s use of the Sandy Hook massacre to move budget talks along, Krauthammer noted his belief that the president is needlessly negative towards Republicans.

“He is excessively self-righteous,” he said. “He talks about the other side as being unprincipled, not interested in a national interest, slaves of an ideology which he says makes no sense and…invested in opposing him to the point where they’re willing to let the country suffer.”

The commentator noted that Obama could strike a softer and less divisive tone and inevitably dismissed the president’s current rhetoric as ”a combination of self-righteous and narcissism.”

The initial comments that spawned debate and comment from Krauthammer came from Obama on Wednesday, when he urged a compromise in contentious and highly-partisan budget talks.

“After what we’ve gone through over the past several months, a devastating hurricane and now one of the worse tragedies in our memory, the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise for the greater good,” Obama said.

Watch Krauthammer’s reaction, below:

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