They fail to see the irony

In the AJC today there's an article about car dealerships "left out of Detroit bailouts".

Here's an excerpt:

Executives with the nation’s Big Three automakers say they love you. They sympathize with you. But they think there are too many of you out there, and they’re not about to come to your rescue if you’re hanging on by a thread.

When pressed about the plight of dealerships during media sessions before the show opened to the public, executives from the Big Three were resolute about what they saw as the need to reduce the number of dealerships as the recession grinds on.

The restructuring plans of all three companies include reducing the number of dealers in communities across the country. But rather than forcing the reduction through corporate strong-arming, which could lead to costly lawsuits or buyouts, executives this week suggested it would be achieved through natural selection: The weakest would go; the strongest would survive.

“When you take a third of the market out, a third of the dealers don’t really have a business to go forward with,” Jim Press, vice chairman and president of Chrysler LLC, said Jan. 11, referring to how the Big Three have lost sales to foreign competition.

How bitter is the irony? Here I was thinking that if you take away a third of the market, then it seems reasonable that one of the Big 3 is likely to go out of business. Instead, they show up in front of Congress with their hands out, ready to suck off the taxpayer tit. But their dealers, of let's let some of them fail, it's only natural.

In this case, my thoughts are that what's good for the goose (dealers) ought to be good for the gander (Big 3).