"Tea Party Downgrade"? They Can't Possibly Sell That

The administration's knee-jerk responses are somewhat inconsistent: if S&P was wrong to downgrade the debt, and the downgrade was based on a mathematical error, then it is hard to see how the downgrade can also be the Tea Party's fault. (In the legal world, this is known as pleading in the alternative: when sued for borrowing a neighbor's pot and breaking it, the defendant answers that he never borrowed the pot; the pot was never broken; and the pot was already broken when he borrowed it.) Of the administration's alternative theories, the most ludicrous is the claim that the Tea Party, the one group dedicated to doing something about the nation's spending and debt crisis, is somehow to blame for it. Yet this is the theory that President Obama's political adviser, David Axelrod, tried to sell on Face the Nation this morning