The standard for Obama: Look at the portfolio, not just one investment.
The standard for Romney: Don’t look at the portfolio, pick out one investment to look at.
With regard to Solyndra, the pay-off was the legal fees paid to the lawyers who had invested heavily in the Obama campaign. That money was skimmed off the top of the loan guarantees and not recovered.
With regard to companies in which Bain Capital lost money (and workers lost jobs), it was their money they lost, not the taxpayers’ money. In contrast, Solyndra execs lost other peoples money.
With regard to Bush, this is a delicate issue. In hindsight, he sold us - movement conservatives and libertarians - a bill of goods.
Bush, along with others, shares in responsibility for huge deficits, the TARP, the housing bubble, and boondoggles such as subsides to so-called renewable energy.
Bush is to Obama what Hoover was to FDR, the John the Baptist of a socialist Messiah.
It is not clear where Romney stands on the Bush legacy. Hopefully, he is smart enough to move on from that agenda.
Many moons ago, in Alabama there was a state treasurer, seem to recall her name as Melba “watching the till” Allen (Melba Till Allen) who was defended by the dem machine (southern dems at the time) by saying:
“She didn’t take no STATE (of Alabama) money!!”
ie. it was ok to skim off the feds, no matter what.
This is the same thing—done nationally, for obamao re-elect. Stimulus slush.
I had it sort of right. This was along similar lines as this Solyndra, at the State of Alabama level, having to do with a state sponsored attraction Stars over Alabama. Melba Allen was skimming money from banks she put the funds into, and got loans back from banks for her husbands and her personal use, in exchange.
The point was attempted to be made at her various trials that “no state money was lost” by doing this. An early version of the assumption that any money “belongs to the state”, and that the banks money was someone else’s money.
It is a wild read but I found a blog (not mine) on the history, and think it is also at wikipedia:
http://downfalldictionary.blogspot.com/2011/04/melba-till-allen-we-are-not-amused.html
Thank you. Great analysis! Should be required reading.
One point I’d add
>>It is an inevitable bump on the road to a clean-energy economy.
I can’t stand the way leftist writers casually throw in words like “inevitable” and get away with it. This is psychologically designed to make the reader overlook and accept it. Nothing to see here. Move along. Just business as usual. No different from any other business.
Furthermore, what is “inevitable?” Solyndra itself? Or the fact that some companies fail?
Most of us who start companies do not get the sweetheart deals that Solyndra got. Most of us sink or swim on our own. Most of us do not live a life of luxury on the taxpayer dime while running a company into the ground and then leave with our bank accounts much fatter than when we started.