Please sit down. Seriously. I will not be responsible for you passing out from surprise and injuring yourself. Today of all days, we must be careful about incurring healthcare costs.
Here’s the news from Politico:
More than a year after House Republicans began investigating the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, the lawmaker leading the probe says it could soon come to a close. “We’re getting closer to getting closure on this,” Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight panel, told POLITICO late yesterday.
“What?” you will exclaim. “Am I to believe that perhaps there was no evidence of wrongdoing to be found?” Yes, dear reader. That is what you are being asked to believe. We understand your hesitance.
Ostensibly, the investigation was all about the money, a wringing of hands over the government’s wasteful expenditure. Granted, it could have turned out better. But as we noted last year, the $535 million invested was chump change compared to other failed investments the government has made. In March, David Roberts predicted that the investigation would end empty-handed, noting that the real goal was never accountability on the investment (an investment that was anything but unusual). Instead, the goal was always political: leverage concerns about misspent money into a tool to attack the president and green energy more broadly.
In February, Politico tried to figure out how much the Solyndra investigation itself cost, coming up with a figure of, “We dunno.” The Republicans doing the investigating were “much less talkative” about how much they’d spent on their investigation than they were on the Energy Department’s investments.
That is why I, today, am calling for an investigation into the investigation of Solyndra. An unknown amount of your tax money was wasted on an overtly political effort! Congress: Issue subpoenas! Call hearings! We must get to the bottom of this, for the sake of the bald eagle and the New York Yankees!
It’s what the Republicans would want.
