The American Spectator

So today’s Dem line in defending against “Obama’s Enron,” namely Solyndra, is that “the Bush admin did ‘due diligence’ on solar company’s loan, Obama officials tell lawmakers,” per Greenwire (subscription required). I’ve been watching the hearing and this is indeed an accurate representation of the wagon-circling, of their defense of the indefensible.

At the hearing’s close, there was a noteworthy addition to that spin by Ed Markey (D-MA) — who, two years ago this month, berated the Spanish economics professor who warned this bubble would burst by saying solar just needed three years to take off, leaving him not much more time to hide this decline — analogized Solyndra to Google and eBay. I forget what sort of hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars these companies needed in order to exist. Someone might check.

Anyway, the flaw with the party line is that the Bushies actually failed to sign off on it, making Solyndra the first bad energy idea we’ve found them fail to embrace. It’s that bad.

And the timeline of disapproval continues, including an Obama OMB email describing the boondoggle as “NOT ready for prime time”, and then the Obama administration — not Bush — rushing the half a billion taxpayer dollars out the door.

I’m raising two small children. I am teaching them to take responsibility. I teach them that it is an undesirable trait to blame others. They see a president and administration and, now, its defenders and enablers, who cannot, regardless of the issue, seem to do anything other than blame others. Even, as here, when it is insultingly implausible, and essentially parodies the Clinton aide of yore who, when confronted with his own prior words, told Congress he was lying to his diary.

But that didn’t cost us a half a billion dollars.