Well, what else did you expect? Standard & Poor’s put the U.S out of the AAA club and into the AA+ fraternity. Apparently, nobody flinched when Reagan increased the national debt* by 186% in his 8 years; nor when Bush 1 increased it 55%; nor took notice when Clinton increased it (a comparatively paltry) 36%. Did they blush when Bush 2 blew it up 89% in his 8 years?

Naaah. You’d have to be a black guy to understand why the Big White House, Standard & Poor’s, has now chosen to get real about how much money America owes to its banks and foreign creditors. I’m willing to bet my life on the fact that not one of the chief authors of the report downgrading America’s debt are black. Now, does that mean they should not have downgraded us? No. It means that S & P is entirely untrustworthy because everybody remembers Ross Perot and his charts showing how rapidly the debt was growing. He said it was unsustainable: that was in 1992. Was anybody at Standard & Poor’s listening then? Or did they not care because good ol’ boys from the Ivy League Schools were in the Permanent Government and nothing bad could happen with those white knights in charge.

Well, when the white knights are out of the White House, they scheme to get back in. They feel a chromatic affinity for the places of power in Washington. So lest you think that President Obama should have done this, or done that, when he had both houses of Congress in his party: remember why 2009 is when we began calling the GOP the Party of No. Obama and leading Democrats were threatened with filibuster on just about every piece of legislation originating on their side of the aisle. This was a tactic that had been used mostly during lame duck sessions of Congress, but very rarely during a President’s first 15 months. Anyone with any analytic thinking skills will quickly deduce that the main goal — the main goal — of the Republican Party has been to bring down a Democrat at whatever cost to the nation, and regardless of that Democrat’s mandate to change things in Washington.

So, the Republicans are getting what they asked for. Obama’s probably embarassed to be the first president in history who has to preside over a nation with a less than pristine credit rating. The White Knights have won the opening volley, tally-ho! After some martini lunches they’ll pat their own backs and plan for more embarassment for the President. More paralysis. These guys are like kids tying firecrackers to the bumper of a car that’s about to have a head-on collision. But they’re not looking at that. It’s playing with firecrackers that really matters to those little White Knights.

Note: numbers about national debt and presidential records is taken from http://www.presidentialdebt.org, August 5 2011.