Did anyone besides me bother reading the article past the headline?
What he said was that, overall, the program did well, and that Solydra's failure was an isolated occurrence, not indicative of anything about the program overall. In any program of this nature, there ARE going to be failures, and the program as a whole must be evaluated rather than sour-cherry-picking the instances where the loans went bad.
If it was a $53,500 it might have some validity in what he said, but a $535,000,000.00 loan, that just doesn't fly, especially what was known about the company's problems before the funds were distributed.