When good is the enemy of perfect

Conservatives must be reeling a little bit today after reading a front page story in The Denver Post with the headline, "Economy making a strong '10 finish." Factories are getting busy again. The Dow is up more than 2 percent. Factory output, led by our bailed out auto industry, has grown for the sixteenth straight month. All regions of the country, except St. Louis and Philadelphia, are growing economically. Private employment has enjoyed the highest monthly increase since November of 2007.

This all sounds like a republican nightmare. The last thing the republican party wants is for something, anything, good to happen to the country because that might hurt their chances to make Obama a one-termer.

I'm sure the republican spin machine is whirring full speed to dismiss this news and reassure the faithful that things are still terrible in the USA and getting worse. And I'm sure all those Tea Partiers out there, the ones who still believe that Obama is not a citizen, but is instead a Manchurian candidate from Kenya bound and determined to turn our exceptional country into a socialist state, can't wait to gobble up the good/bad news that they want to hear from Rush and Glen and Sarah and the rest.

For example, consider the ad hominem spin Denver Post columnist and Mike Rosen wannabe David Harsanyi used a few weeks ago to put the kebosh on the reported resurgence of General Motors ("GM plan the Cadillac of failed ideas," The Denver Post, November 19).

After all the newspapers reported the surprising success of GM's initial IPO after their near collapse, Harsanyi rushed to convince himself and his readers that this was just so much political spin and nothing to brag about.

"Oh, good, the Obama administration has another imaginary victory for taxpayers to celebrate," he sneers in his first sentence, thus setting the tone for the rest of his rant.

He rips Obama's statement that GM "took another step to becoming a success story" with the scornful rejoinder, "Not 'survival,' but success. Taxpayers are going to make a profit even!"

He dismissively admits that GM has paid back in full the approximately $15 billion it borrowed from the government, but then reminds us that the approximately $43 billion taxpayers invested in GM stock remains a losing proposition and will never be recouped because, according to Harsanyi and the "many analysts" he cherry picks, GM will never again flourish.

This seems to fly in the face of GM's recent IPO. According to Politico's Morning Money (By the way, anyone who is now saying to themselves that Politico is just another liberal news outlet hasn't been paying attention, or is seriously reading challenged.), GM's IPO closed at 3.6. percent over the initial price, adding up to a $4 billion profit on the $36 billion the Obama administration put into GM.

"The $40.1 billion in repayments would mean the Obama administration has more than recouped its $36.1 billion. . .and the federal government would recover all but approximately $9.4 billion of its original $49.4 billion overall investment in GM ($13.4 billion of which came under the Bush administration)."

I don't know what any of that means, but it sounds better than Harsanyi would like us to believe.

But he uses other rhetorical devices to fire up the vitriol in his readers. He calls the money we invested in GM a "blank check." How so? From this casual observer's vantage point it seems that GM paid a heavy price for taxpayer's help.

He suggests that the recent safety recalls by Toyota and Honda are simply trumped up scare tactics by the Department of Transportation designed to give GM an advantage. Tell that to the Toyota owners who plowed into things when their gas peddles stuck.

Next he gets mad because companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, those of the bail out, will make a fortune on GM's IPO. It is unfair, he says, to the taxpayers who financed the bailout. So, what exactly is his point? Has anyone in the Obama administration ever said that the bailout was fair? Of course it wasn't fair; it was just necessary. And now we are seeing that it just might be successful.

He then goes on to explain how GM's payback of the initial loan is an illusion because it used TARP money. So what? It was GM's money and they obviously had achieved the liquidity they needed to use it.

He laments the poor share holders who lost money over GM's potential collapse and the government directed bailout by saying "Confiscating the property of investors for the common good isn't generally conducive to a healthy business environment." I understand Harsanyi's effort to lay down a sarcastic salvo got in the way of fairness, but he makes a non-point. Of course the method chosen to save GM wasn't "generally conducive to a healthy business environment," but this was not a normal situation and the business environment GM found itself in at the time was anything but healthy.

Finally, we get to Harsanyi's, and I'm beginning to suspect all conservatives', real complaint about the whole GM thing. Investors, he says, may want to "ask why GM is making ideologically motivated money-losers like the Volt. . . What happens when taxpayers divest themselves from GM's social engineering projects?"

His point is clear that the GM bailout and its movement toward environmentally sensitive automobiles is just another facet of Obama's socialist agenda, like having school children eat healthy food, or having bicycles available in metropolitan areas. IT IS ALL AL GORE'S FAULT FOR TRUMPING UP ALL THIS GLOBAL WARMING BULLSHIT.

Harsanyi just doesn't get it. GM's offering is continuing to grow. The taxpayers are continuing to get a return on their investment. Interest in cars like the Volt is high. All the naysaying in the world will not change that.

Of course the whole situation is unfair. Of course we have a rough road ahead. But I don't see the benefit of commentators like Harsanyi continually making good the enemy of perfect just to score partisan points.