Though House Republicans (see: Tea Party freshmen contingent within the Republican party) have received nearly everything that they wanted in the debt deal, even more than they originally asked for in May, they still seem to be unhappy with the result. Perhaps it's because the an actual debt deal, despite their most muscular attempts to force one, has essentially been put off for a special "super congress" committee this fall. Many Republicans and their co-opted Tea Party stepchildren, have accused Barack Obama of not having taken the reins (on their own party) and shown enough leadership to guide the Congress to a quicker settlement on the debt deal negotiations. This despite the fact that Obama and Biden proposed a "grand deal" of $4 trillion in cuts (twice that of the present one) over ten years, which the GOP dismissed out of hand because it included tax revenue increases.

     The most infuriating aspect of this charade is that the news cycle isn't reporting on one very important piece of the argument; the S&P included in it's explanation of the nation's credit rating downgrade that the Republican-dominated House was, in large part, to blame. In response to tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, the so-called Bush Era Tax Cuts (a $1.7 trillion chunk of the debt burden) apparently being extended indefinitely, S&P further questions the worthiness of investing in the U.S., seeing that decision as a major liability in future economic stability and federal financial health. As quoted from the actual S&P statement explaining the downgrade, "Compared to the previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the [budget]."

    The whitewash by the mainstream news outlets is puzzling. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on this glaring mainstream media oversight, citing an article by Jonathan Allen of POLITICO, in which he referred to the Bush Era Tax Cuts as a prime reason for the nation's downgrade. However, he stopped short of mentioning that Standard and Poors put the responsibility of this fact squarely on the shoulders of congressional Republicans. The Associated Press, by the same token, acknowledged that Republicans were fighting to avoid any raise in tax revenues. However, it also mentioned that Democrats were fighting to protect "giant entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare." However, the Standard & Poor's statements makes no mention of the Democrats protection of entitlements. Instead it says simply this about Medicare: "It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability."

     I have a few guesses as to why the big-news-cycle would avoid mentioning S&P's dispersions on the Republican party. First, the S&P has already been heavily accused of dabbling in political policy-making with this move, by both the White House and the lawmakers. The downgrade was jaw-dropping, to be sure, but for a credit rating agency to take a hard line against a particular political party would look like outright manipulation.  (I would say their "line" was soft, at best). Another possible explanation is that it's not a sensational enough indictment of the Republicans when compared to the tact that many in the news cycle are taking now, which is to implicate the President. An unpopular President is a much juicier topic and contributes to ratings better than to continue to lay responsibility at the feet of those deserving of it; intransigent Republican congressmen and women. The third (and most likely) reason is that the few initial journalists that even looked at the report didn't read the whole thing or read closely enough to notice the golden nuggets of blame that S&P supplied, and so only reported on the broad strokes, preferring to devote their energy to the less substantiated back-and-forth that had already been raging. As the news cycle tends to be cannibalistic, the other major networks simply summarized those original claims. Thus, the fact that the S&P fingers the Republicans in their rationale for downgrading our nation's credit rating for the first time in history went largely unnoticed.