Some more thoughts on the downgrade

In response to the credit rating downgrade, the President came out yesterday and gave a speech... a speech that he's made, seemingly, for the past few months now. Promising "recommendations" (presumeably akin to the ones made by the debt commission that he set up and which he promptly ignored) and the rote, obligatory "repairs to roads and bridges" (5:45). There's nothing left in his statist quiver and his body language seems to sense that.

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Here's Charles Krauthammer on the matter at hand:

"He has put nothing on the table but yet he blames everyone else"

Despite that, Allahpundit comes up with the best explanation of why Obama sounds like a broken record and how it is we've painted ourselves into a corner.

But the deeper horror, of course, is that not all of this will be cured by dumping The One. It’s not Obama who attached that eurozone ball-and-chain to the market’s ankle, and even a Republican president will find his or her options limited amid the next financial crisis. This is an epic fail to some extent not because Hopenchange is a spent force, which it is, but because the western world’s finally been cornered economically by entitlement liabilities that were foreseeable when The One was a toddler. The bill’s come due. What else can he say?

The sober among us have seen this moment coming for years but instead of exclusively pointing the finger at the bad actors in Washington D.C., perhaps we should also be looking at the people who put them there. The political will to turn this thing around is, as the President would say, a shared responsibility.