United Liberty

Don’t look now, but the Solyndra scandal is coming back up in the media. The now-defunct, politically-connected green energy company was given a sweetheart $500+ million loan from the Obama Administration back in 2009. By August 2011, Solyndra had filed for bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers on the hook for millions.

Supporters of heavily subsidized green energy projects downplayed cronyism, which runs rampant in the Obama Administration. But new e-mails show that a White House analyst warned that giving taxpayer money Solyndra would be a big mistake (emphasis mine):

As the Obama administration moved last year to bail out Solyndra, the embattled flagship of the president’s initiative to promote alternative energy, a White House budget analyst calculated that millions of taxpayer dollars might be saved by cutting the government’s losses, shuttering the company immediately and selling its assets, according to a congressional investigation.

Even so, senior officials in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget did not discourage the Energy Department from proceeding with its plan to restructure a federal loan to Solyndra — a move that put private investors ahead of taxpayers for repayment if the company closed, the investigation by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee found.

Remember the 2008 campaign (and afterward) when several of Obama’s opponents were called racist for criticizing him? Remember the conservative backlash against liberals playing the race card? Fast forward to the 2012 campaign and we are once again seeing the same filthy, immature racialism. Only this time it’s coming from a conservative – tea party darling Herman Cain.

I came across this story from ThinkProgress and was immediately skeptical as I am a frequent viewer of The Daily Show and consider myself to be a huge fan of Jon Stewart. I have never once even considered that Jon Stewart harbors any sense of racism. However, keeping an open mind and not wanting to cast a hasty judgement, I decided to hunt down the clip of Stewart’s show in question to see just what it was that Herman Cain was referencing. Perhaps Stewart has said something that Cain merely took out of context. To my surprise, the segment was from a show which I had already seen. The issue of race did not so much as pass through my mind upon my initial viewing that episode, and I did not detect the slightest hint of it the second time.

Here’s what Herman Cain had to say:

I was not going to post about this anymore because I’m tired of hearing about it. But last night, Jon Stewart gave a great monologue on the uproar over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque and it needs to be shared.

Like Stewart, I get the reason people are upset about the mosque. But the push back against the mosque has reached a point where it’s not about placing a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, the rhetoric has reached a point where most of the opposition are condemning an entire religion. They are placing the blame for what happened on 9/11 on an entire religion instead of 19 radical Islamists.

Around three minutes in, Stewarts shows video of Eric Bolling, who was appearing on Fox and Friends, laying out the alleged ties that Feisal Abdul Rauf has to various groups, including Hamas and Perdana. Bolling also speculates on whether or not Iran may be funding Park51, formerly the Cordoba House.

Stewart then uses the same logic to connect Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal to the Bin Laden family and Wahhabist Muslims, a form of Islam followed by al-Qaeda.

For perspective, Stewart shows a clip of Charlton Heston speaking at the NRA convention in 1999, just after the Columbine tragedy. In case you don’t remember, there was an uproar that wanted the NRA to hold their convention somewhere else.

During his speech to the convention, Heston said:

Tragedy always has been and always will be with us. Somewhere right now evil people are evil things. All of us will do everything meaningful, everything thing we can do to prevent it, but each horrible act can’t become an axe for opportunists to cleave the very Bill of Rights that binds us.

Stewart admits he was part of the uproar, but he also admits that he was wrong:

Socialism used to be an ugly word- or at least an ugly concept- in America, but no more. With both mainstream candidates embracing the philosophy, it’s become clearer than ever that it’s time for a major over-haul in the beltway.