What we are also experiencing is a leadership crisis

The talking points have gone out...


John Kerry was out and about on the talkies Sunday making a complete ass of himself again by blaming the credit downgrade on the tea party.

While continuing to cast doubt on the credibility of Standard & Poor’s, several Democrats on Sunday said there is an even greater culprit in the downgrade of the nation’s credit rating: the tea party.

“I believe this is, without question, the tea party downgrade,” Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day that also saw mounting anxieties in world markets over the downgrade among myriad other economic woes worldwide. Some of the world’s top financial ministers issued a joint statement Sunday night committing themselves to preserve the stability of financial markets and their economies.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, used the exact same phrase in dubbing the credit rating drop the “tea party downgrade,” as Democrats tried to position themselves as reasonable, pragmatic leaders and conservative Republicans as irresponsible ideologues who caused the downgrade by refusing to accept any new taxes.

So, let's get this straight: One of the leaders of a party that has controlled the Senate for over 4 for years and which has not come close to producing a budget in about 2-1/2 years and which also shows no testicular fortitude to address the real driver of our national debt, entitlements, is calling out an entity that has applied a laser-like focus on achieving some degree of fiscal sanity to avoid the credit downgrade that just happened on Friday.

Or to put it another way: If Kerry is correct, what Standard and Poor's was saying was needed to avert a downgrade was more spending, more taxes and more government. But somehow, we don't think that Paul Krugman and S&P are of the same mind on this. Crazy, we know, but it's just a notion.


But don't take our word for it, what did S&P have to say about all this?:

The credit-rating agency did not call for tax hikes in its assessment: “Standard & Poor’s takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.’s finances on a sustainable footing.” No position on tax hikes. But S&P, along with the other credit-rating agencies, has long taken a position on one aspect of our fiscal troubles: entitlement reform. From S&P again: “The plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

Kind of sounds like it was about the debt and the lack of any real debt-limiting/reducing entitlement reform, doesn't it?


Well, you can probably forget about that as the pedophiles that form the ruling class in D.C. don't want anything to do with entitlement reform least of all the man currently in the Oval Office who made a speech not too long ago calling for $4 trillion in deficit-reduction to which the head of the Congressional Budget Office, a Democrat, responded wryly, "(unfortunately), the CBO does not score speeches."



Exit question: Since we are lacking any real adult leadership in this debt crisis how long before we get downgraded again?