Is the Tea Party to blame for loss of nation’s AAA credit rating

The short answer is "no". The long answer is also "no". Standard and Poors wanted a $4 trillion deficit reduction deal in order to avoid downgrading our credit from AAA to AA+. Tea Party Republicans had the only plan that met that criteria. They actually passed a deficit ceiling bill, Cut, Cap and Balance, that included $4 trillion in cuts. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats deep-sixed that bill. President Obama had promised to veto it anyway. But..but...liberals claim President Obama had a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan that included cuts and taxes new revenue. That is false. President Obama did have an idea to formulate a big deficit reduction plan, but an idea isn't a plan. You can have an idea to save $5000 extra and take a fabulous Hawaiian vacation, but that is just wishful thinking until you make a plan on when, where and how to save the money, what date to have it accomplished by and other details. Tea Party Republicans had those details in their plan. Of course, the devil is in the details and liberals, Senate Democrats and President Obama didn't like the details of the House GOP Tea Party plan. Nobody else put forth a firm plan that would have saved our AAA credit rating.

(The Hill) — Liberals are growing frustrated with President Obama’s soft response to the Tea Party after fractious negotiations over the debt limit led to the loss of nation’s AAA credit rating on Friday.

Republicans and Democrats have unleashed fusillades of attack against each other in the wake of the announcement but Obama has stayed quiet, frustrating his party’s base.

“It’s hard to see how we avoid a Tea-Party recession if the president who has the biggest megaphone in the country is not willing to speak clearly on the issue,” Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, told The Hill in a Saturday afternoon interview.

Ruben said Obama should never have allowed Tea-Party lawmakers in the House to treat a debt-limit extension as a concession to Democrats given the nation’s entire economy depended on it.

By accepting the threat of a national default as politically valid, Obama put himself at a major disadvantage in the talks, he said.

“It’s a terrible deal that will destroy jobs and big part of reason is because president accepted the premise that it was okay to hold economy hostage,” Ruben said. “Instead of saying, ‘this is outrageous’ and ‘You will not threaten the full faith and credit of the U.S.,’ and telling America what the Republicans are doing, he sat down and said, ‘let’s bargain’ and tried to show he was more reasonable.”