President Obama, the Democratic Party and their members of Congress have spent years blaming former President George W. Bush for the nation's current economic woes, which is akin to blaming the bank's tellers for a bank robbery, or for the dishonesty of their bosses, the bank's executives who were looting the till.
Nobody in the left-dominated media bothers to note that in the last years of the Bush presidency Democrats controlled the Congress and thus had a death grip on the nation's economy, having complete control over the nation's purse strings.
They spent and spent and spent the yet-uncollected taxes of future generations — as well as our own — as if there were no tomorrow.
It wasn't a Bush Congress that jammed the incredible costs of Obamacare down the throats of the American people and their children and grandchildren — it was our spendthrift president and his allies on Capitol Hill doing their classic imitation of the legendary drunken sailors on shore leave.
It's simply common sense to understand that spending money one doesn't have in the hopes that the future will provide the needed funds is something like believing that some beneficent tooth fairy will come up with the money in the future.
Now the president and the national Democratic Party have suddenly discovered a scapegoat for the latest economic mess they have thrust upon the American people. They insist that the credit-rating downgrade was the fault of the tea party trying to control the nation's purse strings. I'm not kidding. They really expect us to swallow this whopper as the gospel truth.
They expect us to ignore the fact that the millions of tea party members are simply Americans deeply and sincerely concerned about the nation's economy and the tendency of the government to spend their hard-earned tax money on whatever scam strikes its fancy.
It's time to place the blame for our economic malaise where it belongs — on the shoulders of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress.
Tea party members have been the voice of reason, not the wild-eyed terrorists portrayed by the left's crazy spin doctors.
What would have averted the credit-rating downgrade and the subsequent turmoil in the markets? Precisely the spending cuts advocated by the tea party.
According to a statement by Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, the debt-ceiling compromise was full of "accounting tricks and minor 'cuts' to spending." She warns that these so-called cuts do not reduce our national debt. They are simply cuts to future deficit spending.
Rather than prevent a crisis, the debt deal has "already cost us our AAA credit rating," according to Martin.
In addition, she explains that the tea party was the only organization pushing for the passage of the Full Faith and Credit Act, which would remove the threat of a national default.
A couple of hundred years ago, a band of American patriots demonstrated their contempt for a distant parliament that imposed unjust taxation upon citizens, with no say in the matter, by dumping British-taxed tea in Boston Harbor. It was one of the acts of defiance that helped spark the American Revolution and created a new nation.
Unlike the Boston tea party, today's today's tea party membership is nationwide and composed of people from every nook and cranny in this vast nation, but they feel the same determination to display their anger at the depredations of an out-of-control national government that the Boston patriots showed toward a distant monarch who legend tells us could not speak a word of English, preferring instead his native German.
It's past time for a little tea dumping of our own — the bitter tea brewed by Barack Obama.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of "The New Reagan Revolution" (St. Martin's Press, 2011). He is the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his website at www.reagan.com
© Mike Reagan