(Via Hot Air) Funny thing about having a chief executive with a clue about business*:
Solyndra officials were intensely pressuring Bush administration officials in early January 2009 to approve a government loan for the solar company before the Obama administration took power, according to new emails obtained by Fox News on Friday.
On Jan. 12, 2009, Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet sent an Energy Department official an email marked “urgent” expressing outrage that Bush officials had decided a few days earlier that while the loan application had “merit” it needed further study before officials could move forward with a taxpayer-financed loan.
…you tend to have people working for you that can detect the reek of a rotten deal at fifty paces. And who are possessed with basic business sense. And who know not to give a visibly failing company half a billion of your tax money. In other words: you have pretty much the opposite of the Obama administration, which pretty much managed to muck all of that up. Solyndra, of course, is the corporation that parlayed a cozy relationship with the Obama administration into a government subsidy for its unprofitable solar panel production model; a model, in fact, that was so self-evidently unprofitable that funding it required that the administration ignore the steadily-increasing screams of disbelief and outrage from government bureaucrats… a group not, perhaps, too well-known for its whistle-blowing activities.
Not very surprising that the administration ignored its own bureaucrats, though: Barack Obama may not attract people who are typically right, and he certainly doesn’t attract people who are particularly competent – but he certainly got a bumper crop in of enthusiasts who are very, very sure, didn’t he just? And they weren’t afraid to double down on that, either – turns out that the original loan was followed up by another one that would have raised the total bill to the taxpayer to over one billion… and nobody knows yet whether they got it or not. Which is also not surprising: may God save us all from liberal academic theoreticians whose typical reaction towards businessmen is an almost point-to-point correspondence to that of superstitious Congolese towards sorcerer penis-thieves…
Moe Lane
*Or just generally a clue, come to think of it.
Not surprising, though, for an administration whose business model presupposes that if you fling oodles of money at something, it must succeed…