Who keyed your car? A Republican.
Who slashed your tires? A Republican.
Who poured sugar in your gas tank? A Republican.
Who killed Detroit? Who do you think?
Reporting from Washington — The congressional push to help U.S. automakers was generally cast in terms of protecting the reeling national economy from another body blow — the collapse of one or more of Detroit’s Big Three.
But in killing the stopgap rescue plan worked out by President Bush and congressional Democrats, conservative Republicans — many from right-to-work states across the South — struck at an old enemy: organized labor.
Cue the fiendish laughter.
There’s even “proof”:
If the 2008 figures are cut off on your screen, take my word that the percentage donated by the Big Three to Republicans dips below fifty percent—which would suggest that the percentage donated to Democrats by Ford, GM, and Chrysler topped fifty percent.
Is that their point? Isn’t the point that labor donates overwhelmingly Democratic more demonstrable and less refutable?
How smart a strategy is that, Big Labor, to completely alienate one of only two political parties?
And so what if the auto industry total leans back toward Republicans? That’s such a broad slice of different businesses—suppliers, dealers, etc.—there’s no common thread of suspicion or guilt. After all, it’s not exactly a surprise that independent business people hew more toward the Republican course of lower taxes and less government red tape. Why would they endorse a party hostile to their interests?
In other words, this story is bogus. It is unsupported even by the very facts (percentage donated to Republicans vs. Democrats) it presents to support its case. Republicans have no wish to shutter entire industries and throw thousands of people out of work—even the most rabid Republican-hater would agree.
But Republicans are more committed to free enterprise—with the possibility of failure just as real as the possibility of success—than Democrats (or they used to be), and they have no reason to be charitable toward the auto unions who wouldn’t piss on a Republican if he were on fire.
Since when did that qualify as news?
UPDATE
Via Patterico, this story stinks even more:
The L.A. Times story on the failure of the bailout blamed it squarely on Republicans, in a story titled Senate Republicans kill auto bailout bill:
Republican opposition killed a $14-billion auto industry bailout plan in the Senate on Thursday night, putting the future of U.S. automakers in doubt and threatening to deliver another blow to the economy.
. . . .
Senate Democrats couldn’t bring the measure up for a vote without the support of at least 10 Republicans. Ultimately, they were seven votes short.
But wait! Via Instapundit, John McCormick at the Weekly Standard points out that Democrats had 10 Republican votes — enough votes to defeat the filibuster.
Of course, I wasn’t willing to accept that some Weekly Standard blogger got this right and the vaunted fact-checkers at the L.A. Times got it wrong. So I checked the actual votes at the Senate.gov website for myself. Here is the list of 10 Republican Senators I found voting “yea”:
Bond (R-MO), Yea
Brownback (R-KS), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea
Dole (R-NC), Yea
Domenici (R-NM), Yea
Lugar (R-IN), Yea
Snowe (R-ME), Yea
Specter (R-PA), Yea
Voinovich (R-OH), Yea
Warner (R-VA), Yea…
Democrats had the votes, just not enough to provide political cover. So they offered a dishonest spin: that they simply didn’t have the votes.
And the L.A. Times was happy to repeat this false spin to readers.
Al Franken’s next book: Lies and the Lying Newspapers That Tell Them.