One More Word on Van Jones

One last word on Van Jones and then I'm going to let him slither off into whatever hole he crawled out of before he became newsworthy.

Carl Pope has a post on HuffPo (linked by Memeorandum - I don't spend time reading HuffPo if I can help it), in which he repeats a meme I've seen coming from the left on this whole story. Van Jones was attacked by the right because he and Obama are black. For crying out loud, people! You were supposed to be the party that puts this race debate to bed. Quit dragging it back out of the box! Race had NOTHING to do with the sacking of Van Jones.

Pope writes, "What we underestimated was the power of the fact that both Jones and the Barack Obama are black. Yes, the hysteria was about politics -- I don't think Fox News really cares about Jones's ethnicity -- but it was enabled by race. Calling Bush a "crack-head" is seen by a large part of America as worse than calling him "addict-in-chief" because crack is not just a drug -- it is a drug used largely by black people. It reminds those Americans who are still uncomfortable with Barack Obama that we have a black president."

How deep did you have to reach to come up with THAT one, Mr. Pope? Your paranoia is astounding.

Van Jones could be purple or blue for all I care; he was targeted because of what he said and because of the petitions he signed which indicated his belief that our government blew up its own World Trade Center and killed over 3,000 people. He is a self-avowed communist. He became a communist in prison. He supports cop killers. I don't care what color he is, he doesn't belong in the administration nor does he need to have oversight of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Pope isn't the only one perpetuating the race paranoia; Nadra Redding says that the only reason anyone is protesting Obama's speech to school kids tomorrow is because he's black.

Charlie Rangel continues to insist that opposition to ObamaCare is primarily because Obama is black.

It's well past time to move past all that. The folks that are making these claims are failing to look at the issues that invite the controversies in the first place. There are plenty of reasons to object to ObamaCare and the education speech was problematic because of the instructions that came with it, not the speech itself. Nobody even knows at this time what the speech is.

And Van Jones? Enough said.

The Amateur Hour Continues

Hot Air had a post this week that has resonated with me and I'm just now getting around to responding to it. The post concerned the amateur hour aspect of the Obama White House. With the resignation of Van Jones in the dark of night last night, the Hot Air post comes back to my mind and I see the Jones story as further reinforcement of Hot Air's thesis. Politico is also, albeit unwittingly, picking up on the theme with today's story on the White House casualty list.

Of course Jones isn't the first in the Obama White House to resign. He's just been the most vocal. Politico highlights four others who have turned in their keys.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air runs a weekly poll called The Obamateurism of the Week; sometimes it's hard to narrow his voting options to just four.

Nobody is prepared for The White House. I say this as a person who has never been there, but it obviously is a job that requires some on the job training. You are never quite prepared. The problem with Team Obama is that they have been so incredibly unprepared, a meme that was prevalent during the campaign, and he has made one costly and embarrasing blunder after another.

Giving the Queen an iPod pre-loaded with his own speeches comes to mind. Giving the Prime Minister plastic helicopter models of Marine One and DVDs that won't play in Britain were two embarrasing blunders.

Consider his coming address to school children this week. Nobody checked to see if kids are actually all IN SCHOOL this week. In some districts, school hasn't started yet. Nobody checked. In the total scheme of things, that's not such a big deal. He's not going to say anything that relevant anyway. But it's just a sign of the amateurism of this team.

More important examples are outlined at Ed's post, among them the inept players that have been appointed to high level positions, beginning with Tim "Turbo Tax" Geithner. I lost count of the number of appointees who didn't pay taxes. That's embarrasing and should have been caught in a proper vetting process.

Ed cites some economic and political decision examples as well, and I'd go on to suggest a serious over-exposure problem. Obama has given 111 speeches and town halls since he became president. People are beginning to tune him out. He says the same thing in all of them and most of what he says is not true. ("You can keep your health insurance!") Even Peggy Noonan has decided he's boring.

Maybe his team is figuring this last one out; he's been "on vacation" for two weeks now. After Martha's Vineyard, he needed a vacation from his vacation and went to Camp David. Of course, he'll be all over your TV this week.

But here we are, he's in office, inept as he is, and we must deal with it. All we can do is keep a watchful eye. Speak out. What the Van Jones incident shows is that the American people do still have a voice. We see that in these town halls. Even if the mainstream media doesn't cover a story, the American people are still watching and listening. The outcry over Van Jones proves that. Having a person like Jones in such a high level position is simply unacceptable. He was always a Jeremiah Wright in a Green Jobs Cloak. It's also, I think, going to lead to a more vocal outcry on the czar process. At last count there are over 30 of them.

As the Jones story plays out its final dying notes this weekend and the liberals spin it as a vicious attack, Jones will play the victim; but remember, because we spoke up there is one less radical in The White House. There are plenty of others who still need to go. The amateur hour continues.

The Big Right Wing Bullies Made Van Jones Resign

We all saw it coming. The resignation of Van Jones came in the middle of the dark night on a Saturday, calculated that way, certainly, to avoid the headlines of the Sunday papers and buried in the news cycle of a holiday weekend.

And we know how it will play out; he'll be martyred by the left and cries of it being a high tech lynching have already begun from the Daily Kos crowd. The writer who penned that phrase goes on to say:

"This is a high tech lynch mob. Aimed at a Black man. Who dared to get uppity. But they’re not racists. Just ask them."

Give me a break. A cursory look at Van Jones and his writings, speeches, music production, and beliefs reveals why he had to go. He wouldn't even have been able to get the lowest level security clearance in the military should anybody ever have checked him out.

But that's the thing - nobody checked him out. That is, nobody but Valerie Jarrett. She's on record as saying she's been watching him for a long time. She should go, too.

The left will cry racism, Jones will say he's a victim, and the majority of the country will be trying to figure out who Jones even is once it finally hits the papers. If it hits the papers. But the truth is, Jones should never have been hired and examination of many of the Obama czars will show the same thing. The reason they are czars is because they couldn't clear the confirmation hearings. And looking at who has already passed the confirmation hearings, that's pretty sad.

So hit the road, Jones. Take your revolution somewhere else.

DLTDHYOTWO.

For more on this, Robert Stacy McCain was all over this last night with constant updates. Memeorandum has the aggregation for you. Michelle Malkin has the ultimate post on the state of it all right now and how the mainstream media will deal with this, or not.

Van Jones and the HuffPo Posts

While reading Hot Air a while ago I caught Allahpundit's post which noted that the mainstream media is ignoring the Van Jones story. Silly me, thinking, WHAT!? NO WAY! had to go check.

A search of the NYTimes has nothing. Neither does the Washington Post. On ABC, Jake Tapper is covering the story. As of this posting, CBS has a rather cursory post on it which says Jones signed a Truther petition "six years ago" and that Conservatives are "clamoring" for his head.

You want news on the Van Jones story? It's all at Memeorandum, stringing on down the page.

Now tell me. Obama's Green Jobs Czar is a self-avowed communist, a believer in 9/11 conspiracy theories, a supporter of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and he's still employed by Barack Obama? By you, the taxpayer?

Then I came across this piece written by Jones for the Huffington Post in 2006. The title is "On Being Black at a Latino March" and Jones writes of his experience in a San Francisco "Day Without Immigrants" March. Jones laments the status of the Black Freedom Movement as he watches the optimism of the Latinos:

Deep inside, I was grieving for my own people. I wished that my beloved African-American community had managed, somehow, to retain our own sparkling sense of faith in a magnificent future. There was once a time when we, too, marched forward together, filled with utter confidence in the new day dawning. There was a time when we, too, believed that America's tomorrow held something bright for us ... and for our children.

But those dreams have been eaten away by the AIDS virus, laid off by down-sizers, locked out by smiling bigots, shot up by gang-bangers and buried in a corporate-run prison yard. Now we cling to Black History Month for validation or inspiration. That's because Black Present Moment is so depressing -- with worse, almost certainly, on the way.

When Katrina's floodwaters washed our problems back onto the front pages, the once-mighty Black Freedom Movement could not rise even to that occasion. Our legendary "movement" has collapsed, fallen apart. It is now a hollowed-out shell -- with our "spokespersons," both young and old, trying somehow to live off our past glories.

In celebrating the Latino's achievements he says we should "embrace those upon whom our economy has come to rest" and allow them status and protections. He says:

Strong brown hands have grabbed hold of the U.S. flag. They are pulling it away from those who have monopolized it, from bullies who have abused the nation's symbols for their violent and illegitimate ends.

Who exactly is he referring to when he speaks of "bullies" and those who "have abused the nation's symbols for their violent and illegitimate ends"?

A review of his other HuffPo articles show him to believe that Hurricane Katrina was "supercharged" by global warming and was Bush's fault (neglect, you know); he also laments the fact that we routinely abuse prisoners in domestic prisons and says it would actually be more a surprise if our military had NOT abused prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. He believes that "people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do" and if people of color don't become involved in the green movement, we'll end up with "eco-apartheid" as "Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities suffer the most from the environmental ills of our industrial society." Everything is a race issue with him.

This guy passed the vetting process? Is Obama going to tell us when he throws Jones under the bus that he didn't know he was like this?

This guy wouldn't even get a security clearance for the military or a civil service job, much less the keys to the White House.

Speechless.

The Truther Says He's Sorry Now

Via Memeorandum and Hot Air, among others, the Van Jones story gets even more bizarre. According to Jake Tapper, he " issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into 'evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur.'"

He clarified this statement by then saying that he "did not review the language in the petition" before adding his name.

And we're supposed to buy this? We're supposed to accept it?

How much confidence is this supposed to restore in us that Obama hires not only a self-proclaimed communist, a Truther, and now a guy that doesn't read documents proclaiming high-treason against the government before signing them?

I don't think this is a case in which "I'm sorry" works.

Time for Jones to resign. DLTDHYOTWO!

Van Jones the Truther

I'm with Allahpundit on the Van Jones story. On Hot Air, he wrote, "I think Jones’s hiring is best explained not as a breakdown in vetting but as a goof by Obama to see just how much crap the media will let him get away with. “Hey Rahm — bet you 20 bucks I can get a Truther communist appointed to an environmental oversight position.”

And this is the Van Jones video circulating today from Naked Emperor News:



My initial reaction to the Van Jones thing and, well, the whole Culture of Corrpution White House, is just incredulous. It's as if Obama MEANS to make a laughingstock of the entire process. Van Jones is not a vetting error. His background was known to Barack Obama. Obama sees nothing frightening or irregular in the Jones philosophy and in fact shares much if not all of it.

My position during the election, during the campaign, was basically that one's character and philosophy is often reflected in the friends you keep. I was criticized on that. I had people tell me that they have friends that do things or believe things that they certainly would never do themselves; this does not make one guilty of also doing or believing such things. True enough. But, Obama has surrounded himself with The Most Corrupt and Revolutionary group of individuals you could possibly imagine. If you TRIED to get any more deviant than this group, it might be difficult.

You can try to float moral equivalency arguments here but that dog won't hunt.

Not this time.

Van Jones. He believes that our government blew up The World Trade Center. He believes we let it happen. He's a Truther. And a communist. And the Green Jobs Czar.

God help us.

(There's more at Memeorandum.)

Glenn Beck's Video Biography of Van Jones

There are one or two folks that read this blog who don't also read Hot Air as a matter of habit, so I'm stealing this video from them because I think people ought to see it. Feel free to steal it from here and post it wherever you please.

I've long been opposed to Obama's growing (still growing) czar empire at The White House and fully believe it is because most of these people would not stand up to the confirmation process. Michelle Malkin's book, Culture of Corruption, makes this even more clear. There are currently over 30 czars and as I've written before, many of them are redundant, echoing jobs that are also cabinet positions.

This video targets Van Jones, founder of Color of Change which is leading the Glenn Beck boycott. Jones has been a target of Beck's even before Jones thought about a boycott. Now Beck has complied this biographical video of Jones:



There is no way the GOP would have voted, for their part, to confirm this guy had he been appointed to a cabinet position. So not only is Obama circumventing the entire vetting process, he's appointing people he knows would not make the cut. There's no way on earth he could not know about this guy's past. Oh wait, he'll say, "That's not the Jones I knew!"

Color of Change Tries to Shut Down Glenn Beck

I find this story from Red State rather disturbing. Obama's Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, who founded the group Color of Change, has hired a Hollywood PR group to pressure Glenn Beck's advertisers to stop advertising with Beck's cable program.

Michelle Oddis has a post on this at Human Events; she says:

On July 28th, Beck made a comment on the Fox & Friends morning show about Obama’s reaction to the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. During the discussion of “Professor-Gate,” Beck connected the President’s past association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Obama’s comment that Cambridge police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, acted stupidly. Though Beck acknowledged most of the Obama administration is in fact white, he concluded that the President’s world experience made him a "racist."


Now Color of Change has pressured SC Johnson, Progressive Insurance, and Geico to boycott Beck's program. Red State has the contact numbers for these folks if you'd like to send them your two cents. Oddis also includes Proctor and Gamble in her list as well as Nexis Lexis.

Color of Change has this statement on their front page:

Fox's Glenn Beck recently said President Obama is "a racist" and has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Beck is on a campaign to convince the American public that President Obama's agenda is about serving the needs of Black communities at White people's expense. It's repulsive, divisive and shouldn't be on the air.

Join us in calling on Beck's advertisers to stop sponsoring his show.

Color of Change is a non-profit organization. Were government dollars used to organize this boycott? And if they succeed in shutting down Beck, where will it end?