While many on the right are lambasting the Obama administration for its failure to maintain the country’s pristine AAA credit rating, one conservative commentator said Sunday that the Standard and Poor’s downgrade needn’t be taken seriously.
Washington Post columnist George Will was asked on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” how much the downgrade would “affect the basic economy here?” Will said it wouldn’t before trashing Standard & Poor’s track record. (RELATED: Standard & Poor’s ratings head: U.S. could be downgraded even further)
“You called this a shocker,” Will said. “Standard & Poor’s would have forfeited its good reputation if it had a good reputation to forfeit these days. It missed the entire mortgage-backed securities problem right under its nose.”
According to Will, the agency’s downgrade decision reflected its disapproval of America’s governing process more than anything else.
“If you read what they actually said, it’s a kind of half-baked political analysis criticizing the American system of government and how it works now,” Will said.
“Now, they’re entitled to their opinion on politics, but their opinion isn’t entitled to any particular respect. What did we learn from what they said that we didn’t know already? We know that from Athens in Greece to Sacramento in California, with stops in Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Brussels, Dublin and Springfield, Ill., an entire system of governance is under attack and actually collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. We’ve learned nothing from Standard & Poor’s.”