>>8185603 2009 Is Obama closing GOP-leaning car dealers?
by Mark Tapscott
| May 26, 2009 12:00 AM
Anyone remember this?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/is-obama-closing-gop-leaning-car-dealers
There appears to be a side to the Chrysler bankruptcy that has the look of an ugly partisanship not seen in this town since Tricky Dick Nixon was in the White House composing his enemies list and checking it twice every night while watching the evening TV newscast.
Bloggers on the Right side of the Blogosphere are up in arms over data suggesting that President Obama’s White House auto industry potentates are targeting for closure Chrysler dealers with records of contributing either to Republicans like John McCain or to other Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary.
Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross pointed intitially at the remarkable number of closed Chrysler dealerships whose owners happen to have been contributors to Obama opponents, mainly Republicans.
But those observations were all couched with important qualifiers, particularly that all conclusions were necessarily preliminary, pending completion of a comprehensive analysis of the political contributions by all closed Chrysler dealership owners, and a comparison of those results with contributions by dealers who are not being closed.
That said, when multiple dealers who have been closed are found to have contributed millions to Republicans and mere hundreds to Obama, the serious number-crunching cannot be completed too soon.
Then there is the Reuters report quoting a lawyer representing dealers being closed who came away from a deposition of a senior Chrysler executive with the distinct impression that the company is simply following orders coming from the White House.
"It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers. It really wasn't Chrysler's decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President's automotive task force," said attorney Leonard Bellavia.
Bellavia zeroed in on the fundamental problem with Obama’s takeover of two of Detroit Big Three – something is terribly wrong when the government tells corporations who to hire and fire, what products to sell and who will be their dealers.
"What is the next task force? Shoe stores? Pizzerias?" Bellavia said. "The problem we have is the free enterprise system is not run by the government, it's run by business entrepreneurs. The dealers themselves will decide if it's not productive to go forward."
In view of these facts, when is the mainstream media going to challenge Obama to explain why he thinks he can do a better job running car companies than can the shareholders, bondholders and dealers? And where in the Constitution does it say the president has such authority in the first place?
More to the point, when is the mainstream media going to start calling what Obama is doing what it is, which at the very least is a crude kind of South American crony statism. Given the Chicago roots of Obama and his chief of staff, the phrase used recently by the Examiner’s Michael Barone is probably most accurate - “gangster government.”
not all copied from original article