Darrell Issa Pulls a Vanilla Ice: “It’s Not the Same”

Now that it’s politically convenient, Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, calls government loan guarantees “picking winners and losers.” He apparently didn’t feel that way when advocating for nuclear loan guarantees.

Issa is also one of 62 Republicans in Congress who requested government assistance for cleantech projects for “domestic job creation” before he started calling clean energy jobs “unproven.”

In an effort to tarnish the White House as much as possible this election season, many members of the Republican House leadership have reversed their previous support for government help in the clean energy sector and are now using the Solyndra investigation to stand against any federal involvement in the energy sector.

As more journalists question the strategy, Issa is finally responding. Speaking to Politico, Issa danced around hypocrisy of his request letter and started blaming the administration for an unproven “violation of the law,” never addressing the actual problem: That he favored government assistance in his district before it was convenient to be against it.

“Letters don’t mean very much. But the people able to make that decision or able to force somebody to make that decision, that’s where I think we look at whether it’s right or wrong,” he said. “Letters saying ‘please look’ are very different, and the administration knows that. And they were very disingenuous in trying to say that somehow there was any equivalency between being able to run in violation of the law, subordinate a loan and give some additional money to a failing company and a company who wasn’t getting an answer at all and a number of members sent letters.”

In deflecting the issue, Issa sounds a lot like Vanilla Ice when he defended the uncredited sampling of Queen and David Bowie’s song “Under Pressure” for his famous song, “Ice, Ice, Baby.”