White House Environment Official Under ‘Vicious Attack’ Resigns

Believing that they are on a roll after a month of the most ignorant display of right-wing racism in the history of the nation, at least since color TV was invented, the far right lynch mob was at it again this past week in an effort to slander a top environmental official with the Obama White House out of his government position.

The White House environmental adviser Van Jones, under fire from Fox News’s off-the-deep-end pundit Glenn Beck, resigned this weekend, saying he “understood that he was going to get in the way” of President Barack Obama’s agenda, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sunday.

Jones, who specialized in environmentally friendly “green jobs” with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was accused of making “inflammatory statements” well before he joined the administration. He said he decided to resign after enduring what he called a “vicious smear campaign.”

The resignation was disclosed without advance notice by the White House in a dead-of-the-night e-mail on a holiday weekend.

Why did this Van Jones get axed? According to Wonkette, “because wingnuts were angry,” because OMG, he called Republicans “assholes!”

Which of course is true, for the most part. But the truth never stopped a lynch mob before.

Well before he joined the administration, he had also signed onto the idea of an investigation of what really happened on September 11, 2001, which sounds like a pretty good idea to us.

A reader who knows Van Jones, Jan Coleman of California, said she rarely writes editorial comments, especially “not about things political,” but she gave her permission to publish these comments here.

“I feel I MUST,” she said, “as I am outraged at the lies, bullying tactics, racism, and badgering that caused Van Jones to resign his position on the Environmental team in the Obama administration.”

“Anyone who knows Van knows him to be a brilliant young man, grounded in protecting the good and the rights of all, a visionary, someone who challenged the not-always-so-invisible boundaries created between races and economic classes, a born leader often seen as a young Obama, a mediator on important issues, a man of integrity and creative thinking who is destined to accomplish great things on behalf of all of us,” she said. “To watch the organized campaign against him expressed with such hatred, militant anger, racist and slanderous remarks by those on the Far Right — and those in the media who are fanning such flames — is sickening to anyone who has a conscience.

“The same tactics, propogated by lies and innuendoes, are being directed against Obama, his family and those supporting him,” she continued. “Personally, I have not in my lifetime ever seen or felt such evil, organized ‘no holds barred’ political warfare in this country. The hatred is blatant — take a look at some of the signs being held by crowd members at rallies and Obama appearances.

“Where does it stop? And what do we do to change it? My frustration is in my not knowing,” she said. “I am reminded that Albert Einstein wrote” ‘The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who won’t do anything about it.’”

Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director:
blamed the incident on the activist progressive community.

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by Joan Brunwasser

Welcome back for the second half of my interview with The Locust Fork News-Journal‘s editor and publisher, Glynn Wilson. So, Glynn, if, according to you, it takes a huge investment of time and energy to understand a story, that explains why the mainstream press has not done its job on many important stories. You, on the other hand, are eminently qualified to discuss the Siegelman/DoJ case. So, if Rip Van Winkle approached you and said, “Ever since I woke up, I keep hearing the name Siegelman. What’s up with this guy?” could you walk him through it so he would grasp why the Siegelman case is so significant?

Hmmm. Well, as you know from researching the case yourself, it is a complicated deal. It’s hard to boil it down to a sound bite for TV, but this is what I can say.

Like any politician, Don Siegelman is certainly no perfect human being. This may be hard for people who live in so-called blue states to grasp, but just identifying yourself as a Democrat in a red state like Alabama invites irrational attacks from the right. And in what I like to call “the Bush years,” they really didn’t care about the Constitution or the abstract concept called “the rule of law.”

People who believe the Bible fundamentally and get their news from Fox and Rush Limbaugh and conservative Big Mule rags like The Birmingham News don’t care about facts or the truth. Many of them still believe George Bush was “the man.” They didn’t get the OpEdNews memo.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind.

When Bob Riley stole the election from Siegelman in 2002 in the closest race in Alabama political history, (according to whistle-blower Jill Simpson, a Republican operative with close ties to the Rileys at the time) the Rileys threatened to use the legal system to investigate Siegelman if he ever ran again. So when he announced in 2004 that he would run again in 2006, the Karl Rove-Bill Canary political machine kicked into high gear to go after him. Canary’s wife, Laura Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, then launched the investigation of Siegelman.

Even though the career prosecutors in the Department of Justice could not really find enough evidence to bring charges, and told attorney Doug Jones nothing was likely to result from the case, a “top down” review of the case was ordered from Washington after Rove, Bush’s political adviser, had communications with people in the DoJ. That we know, even though the Birmingham News editorial page editors continue to deny it.

I have been asked numerous times by average people not on the hard right or left how it could be possible that the courts could be so corrupted in a case like Siegelman’s that politics would trump truth and justice. It is perhaps hard to fathom, but just ask Paul Minor in Mississippi or any of the U.S. attorneys who were fired on orders from the White House for not being politically loyal enough. Rove was a student of Machiavelli, who wrote and told King Henry VIII that kings either rule by love or fear. Bush was not the kind of man who inspired love, so he had to rule by fear by demanding absolute loyalty.

The point of prosecuting Siegelman was not about the law. It was about politics from the start.

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