In case you haven't yet heard of Solyndra, the short version is that the wingnuts and the GOP have been nursing a collective giant boner over what is largely a contrived, overblown scandal filled with their favorite liberal boogeymen - government waste, government excess, and evil liberal non-petroleum based energy. Check out this LA Times article, linked to by Kevin Drum, for a muted but thorough background on the facts of the matter.
But on to more pressing matters. Just like any time the GOP trumps up some purely fanatical, bull shit "controversy" or "scandal," the stenographers in the evil liberal media rush to give it a leg up to avoid the appearance of bias. You know, the monkeys flinging poop at one another are talking about it, so we need to be doing the same:
And I won't include the cable news graph, because you don't need to look at that to know that Fox News has spent an inordinate amount of time flogging this scandal. While Media Matters compares this disproportionate coverage to the corruption at the Minerals Management Service (former name of the failed regulator that allowed awesome things like the BP Gulf oil spill to happen) and war contracting, it is worth mentioning that there are any number of exponentially more egregious crimes and abuses that have received very little outrage and even less coverage. What about the financial crisis? We had a group of asshole Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission who refused to even include the terms "Wall Street" or "deregulation" in their final report. You know, because poor people and minorities are what caused the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.
I'll let you decide which is a more prominent case of the wholesale fucking of the American tax payer - trillions of dollars in tax payer funded bailouts to banksters (foreign and domestic) with no strings attached, who immediately returned to the same excess and same practices that lead to global economic armageddon, or a $528 million Department of Energy loan guarantee to a company that ended up getting undercut by a heavily subsidized Chinese market and subsequently went bankrupt. Neither are acceptable nor desirable, but again, which of these are worthy of our national media's golden retriever-like attention span (SQUIRREL!)?
And I'll reiterate for the millionth time - to date there have still been no high level indictments or convictions of high level banksters of financial sector executives despite reams of evidence of endemic fraud and consumer abuse.
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