"Tea Party Downgrade"

So, let me get this straight: every problem we've faced in the economy since Obama took office is Bush's fault, because it started before Obama took office. But the "Tea Party" has been a small minority in the House for less than seven months, and, according to the same Obama (via his advisor, David Axelrod), the downgrade is all the Tea Party's fault?

The hypocrisy on this is jarring. Even if the criticism made sense, the case being made here requires an amount of cognitive dissonance, between don't-blame-me-I'm-new and blame-them-they're-newer, greater than the American psyche can muster.

Of course, the criticism doesn't make sense. Yes, of course, the "Tea Party conservatives" -- I tend to just think of them as "conservatives" -- in the House did hamper Boehner's ability to get an all-Republican bill through the House. But this obviously raises the question: what was stopping him from getting a bipartisan bill through the House? He needed to get a bill the Democratic Senate would agree to anyway, because "Tea Party" support wouldn't pass a bill through the Senate. And oddly, the Senate never passed a single attempt at compromise until the final hours before the "deadline," and the Democrats in the House didn't support any bill until a few hours before that.

What the Democrats are really saying is that the "Tea Party" is to blame for not going along with a bill that the Democrats also wouldn't go along with. What makes this criticism even worse is that if the Democrats went along with it, it would've passed weeks or months earlier in both houses, whereas if only the "Tea Party" went along with it, it still wouldn't have passed the Senate.

Any objective view of the events shows that it was the Democrats that prevented passage of a compromise bill earlier on: they opposed all attempts to pass any legislation, never offered any of their own until the end, and opposed the exact same bills they villify the "Tea Party" for opposing.

But it's even worse than this hypocritical nonsense: on substance, the "Tea Party" proposal was the only one that, guaranteed, actually would've prevented a downgrade. Say whatever you like about the S&P statement, but the main concern was ever-increasing debt, and cut/cap/balance (along with similar proposals) would've fixed that problem, even if you don't like other results of it. No other proposals, including the one that passed, seriously deals with the debt. Obama's guaranteed continuing debt increases, and Boehner's merely holds out hope for some cuts in the near future.

It's a sad world to live in where a group of citizens can be ticked off, elect people to represent them, who then back the only plan that will actually solve the problem they were elected to solve, and (as a small minority) voice their opposition to a plan that the entire opposing party also opposes (because it won't solve the problem they were elected to solve), and somehow ... they end up with all the blame.