Were you as irritated as I was when President Obama peevishly complained that we “don’t have a triple-A political system”?
This is no way for the man who leads the world’s oldest democracy, a democracy whose Constitution has stood the test of more than two centuries, to talk, even if he is frustrated. Here is the actual quote from CBS News:
The president warned that if an agreement isn’t reached, the U.S. could lose its triple-A credit rating. “Not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills – we do,” he said. “But because we didn’t have a triple-A political system to match our triple-A credit rating.”
Well, thanks to Hamilton, Jefferson, and those other guys!
The irony of course, as pointed out by Ed Morrissey, is that what the president is complaining about is that our system of government does work—it just doesn’t give him everything his heart desires:
Actually, the standoff shows that our political system seems to be improving. Representative government works best when elected officials listen to their constituents – and clearly, Congress heard enough from voters in the last midterm election to understand that we see spending as the problem, not undertaxation. Congress finally resolved the standoff by shifting focus to spending reductions, perhaps for the first time in decades, although we’ll see just how committed they will be to following through on that approach.
Republican ad-meisters would be smart to use the president dissing our political system in the 2012 election. Not sure an American president has ever said anything like this before!