Obama, too, bears his share of the blame

Well, the deficit deal didn't work. Standard and Poor's thought that less than three trillion out of a fourteen trillion dollar deficit wasn't good enough- and was convinced by the Tea Party's and the GOP's brinksmanship in holding the economy hostage to blackmail  that our national leaders at present lack both the will and the common sense to handle the situation like grownups.

S&P downgraded us to AA+ rating. For the first time in our history, we are considered a less reliable national credit risk than Canada, Germany, and the UK. The very thing the Tea Party tried to blackmail us with happened despite the deal (though probably not in as severe a form as would have happened if we'd defaulted; we still maintain our AAA rating with two of the three rating agencies).

Two things need to be borne in mind in assessing blame. The first is that it is very likely that the downgrade could have been avoided if the Republicans had accepted Obama's original deal, and committed to cutting the deficit by 6.3 trillion over ten years.

The problem was that the Obama proposal included tax increases, which the Republicans wouldn't accept. But anybody who thinks we're going to dispose of a $14 trillion deficit without tax increases- by cutting spending alone- is smoking illegal herbs.

That said, there is a far more significant reality here. That the media is silent on this point is evidence of its liberal bias as powerful as anything that has come down the pike in decades.

How did we get the huge national debt which resulted in Standard and Poor's lowering our rating? We hear a great deal about the "Bush deficit" from Democrats- and from their allies in the media. But the Bush deficit totalled $800 billion- not the 1.3 billion President Obama claims. Now, admittedly, that's not chicken feed. When Dubyah took office, the national debt was $ 5, 768 trillion.  When he left office, it was $10,626 trillion.

But even if we accept Mr. Obama's distorted figures, that means that he racked up a bigger deficit in his first two years in office alone than Mr. Bush did in all eight of his years.

During the Bush administration,  the national debt rose an average of $607 billion a year. During the Obama administration thus far, it has risen an average of $1,723 trillion a year. To be fair, it was the Bush administration that submitted the 2009 budget- although without the ineffectual and wasteful $410 billion "porkulus" bill. None of this, of course, includes the $341 billion Obamacare will add to the national debt by the end of 2019..

Bush deficit? Come off it. Admittedly, Dubyah spent like a drunken sailor. But next to Barack Obama, he was a miser.

Yes, the Republicans screwed up- and the downgrade by Standard and Poor's can be directly attributed to the impression of instability created by the debt limit hostage crisis. But we weren't downgraded when George W. Bushw as president.

It look Barack Hussein Obama, the most reckless spender in our nation's history, to pull of that historic achievement.