Conspiracy Theories

Bloggers are speculating that perhaps Chrysler dealers were closed for selection on the basis of donations to Republicans (via Jonah and sfexaminer.com).

To quickly review the situation, I took all dealer owners whose names appeared
more than once in the list. And, of those who contributed to political
campaigns, every single one had donated almost exclusively to GOP candidates.
While this isn't an exhaustive review, it does have some ominous implications if
it can be verified.

I doubt the Administration would do anything so colossally stupid, at least directly. I expect that list was compiled by Chrysler people, and how could they receive such directions without leaving a paper trail?

It is conceivable that the Administration was consulted on the list, and drew Congress into those consultations, and that lists with more Democrats were discovered to have various business problems, and that such business problems kept emerging until the list became Republican through a process akin to natural selection. It's also possible that the demographics of the redundancies in Chrysler's network overlapped with the demographics correlated with Republican membership. We would have to see a pattern of Republican dealerships closed in proximity to Democratic dealerships, and that against the patterns we would expect from some reasonable business logic, and without a plausible business logic for those patterns.

If there is an apparent pattern, it deserves scrutiny. But it would be shocking to see that this happened on any plausible basis. Let's remember that a lot of these dealers are getting screwed, and the Republicans among them already dislike this Administration, so they are primed to see something sinister.