Van Jones, an Obama administration special advisor in charge of “green jobs,” resigned this week after a firestorm erupted over his past remarks and actions. Jones signed a petition in 2004 that stated the Bush administration “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” and was recorded calling Republicans “a--holes” at a February meeting of Democratic activists. During the 1990s, when Jones was a community activist in Oakland, he referred to himself as a communist and “black nationalist.”
Administration critics led by Fox News talk-show host Glenn Beck hammered the administration for hiring someone with a history of support for radical causes, and Jones resigned after it became clear that the controversy could interfere with President Obama’s efforts to overhaul health care. Complaining of “a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones said, “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past.”
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Obama, actually, is betraying the Left, and this is just another example of it, said John Nichols in The Nation. By letting “right-wingnuts like Glenn Beck” drive a remarkable and brilliant environmentalist out of a job, Obama has only encouraged his enemies to keep launching smear campaigns against effective aides and officials they want to neutralize.