Executive Branch
White House Green-Jobs Czar Resigns After 9-11 Truther Flap
Posted Sep 8, 2009 6:19 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A Yale-educated lawyer who was President Obama’s special adviser for environmental jobs has resigned in the wake of controversy over his past statements and his signature on a Sept. 11 “truther” petition.
Van Jones submitted his resignation in a letter marked by a combative tone, the New York Times reports. “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”
Jones was criticized for signing a petition in 2004 that questioned whether President Bush had allowed the Sept. 11 attacks to provide a pretext for war. Jones has maintained he didn’t review the language in the petition and does not agree with it.
CNN notes other statements that generated controversy. Jones used a vulgar expression to refer to Republicans and he told the East Bay Express in 2005 that the police acquittal in the Rodney King beating made him a Communist.
The Volokh Conspiracy says the resignation highlights a problem with the policy czar system: “By circumventing the normal appointment and confirmation process, it makes it more likely that a poorly qualified person or one with ridiculous policy views will be put in charge of important issues,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote.

Comments
J.D.
Sep 8, 2009 9:10 AM CST
It’s great to see the mainstream media finally catching up to a story that became the news about three weeks ago. Most internet publications have been on top of this. Of course, there’s much more to the story:
Obama’s green appointee is self-described “rowdy black nationalist” who explains that his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class “justice.”
I’m sure if Bush had appointed a self-described “rowdy white nationalist” the media would have sat on the story for weeks… uh, huh.
But that was BEFORE the Los Angeles riots. After that, Jones said, “I was a communist.”
Yes, Obama has APPOINTED A COMMUNIST to a White House position. And Obama circumvented the Congress (and probably the Constitution) to do so.
In the interview, Obama’s appointment explained: “I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”
Obama’s is now on record supporting a guy who was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. Supportive lefty groups have described STORM’s agenda as “third-worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism).”
Obama’s appointee also said he was willing to hide his radicalism, as long as it advanced the radical agenda: “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
OF COURSE, this is only the tip of the iceberg. But the New York Times is blaming “conservative critics.” I guess anyone in the country who is not a Marxist is now a “conservative” according to that failing rag.
Perhaps if the media—and the ABA Journal—did a better job of vetting new lawyers to Obama’s cabinet, we could have limited the damage now suffered by the Obama Admin. But the truth will always come out, no matter how hard the activist media tries to hide it, and the result is now even lower approval ratings for the White House and even greater public distrust of the “journalist” class.
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B. McLeod
Sep 8, 2009 3:55 PM CST
But was he a “Legal Rebel”? Inquiring minds want to know.
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