S&P Downgrade: Some GOP Wanted Default

08 August 2011 |permalink | email article

GREG Sargent, who writes The Plum Line blog in the Washington Post, wonders putting aside the question of whether we should accord any credibility to the Standard and Poors’ downgrade, “it’s hard to see how conservatives can claim S&P’s report is a political victory”

The report said: The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.”

But some Republican hardliners, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has admitted, chose to see the downgrade not as a defeat but a victory. McConnell has repeatedly said that the use of default this way is a good thing.

McConnell’s chilling observation: “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this – it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses on the Congress that must be done.” McConnell also said this is something that should happen again in the future. It’s now self-evident that an extremist Republican leadership values defeating Obama far more than a concern about possible future downgrades. Their motto: Screw the country!

Quotable

Judson Phillips, the Wisconsin founder of Tea Party Nation: “I detest and despite everything the left stands for. How can anybody endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century, is beyond me.”

“Financial markets create their own dynamics, but I don’t think we’re facing a double dip recession. – Billionaire Warren Buffet told Bloomberg Standard & Poor’s erred when it lowered the U.S. credit rating and reiterated his view that the economy will avoid its second recession in three years.

“We pray for our governor Rick Perry who has had the courage today to call this time for fasting and prayer just as Abraham Lincoln did in the darkest days of the Civil War.” – Controversial Pastor John Hagee, whose 2008 endorsement John McCain rejected, and who said the Holocaust was a divine plan.

“I would say that the Republicans are gearing up to destroy the president, that the president will have to respond in a very powerful way, and the result for the country could be calamitous. – California Gov. Jerry Brown to CNN.

   

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