Far Right Lynch Mob At It Again…
September 6th, 2009White 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.
“Thursday evening I got worried. Friday I put in a call to ask Van Jones how to help. Saturday I started writing a blog post, which would have appeared this morning,” he wrote. “But on Saturday night, Van resigned, and this morning I was sick at heart. Collectively we — the environmental community, progressives, and the Obama administration — blew this, and we let our cause, our president, and Van Jones down.”
“This was a lynch mob and, when it started forming a month ago, we didn’t take it seriously enough,” he said. “When I saw the first Glenn Beck piece on Van Jones and the Apollo Alliance as the new vast left-wing conspiracy, I could not take it seriously. Silence enabled Fox to keep pushing. The statements for which Jones apologized — the reference to the right as “assholes” and saying that Bush was talking “like a crack-head” were such ordinary political discourse — think Rahm Emmanuel, think Dick Cheney saying “fuck yourself” to Senator Leahy, think Tom Friedman dubbing Bush “the addict-in-chief” — that I didn’t understand why an apology was necessary; I assumed it would blow over.
“Well, that was a mistake,” he said. “So was the decision by the White House to treat the initial attacks not as part of an assault on the president but, instead, to allow them to be viewed as being about Van Jones. What we underestimated was the power of the fact that both Jones and Barack Obama are black.
“Jones is an extraordinarily important leader,” Pope said. “He cares, passionately, about helping young men and women find their way in the world, even if they had the misfortune to grow up in bad neighborhoods or make bad choices — and he sees in a new green economy a powerful instrument to heal their lives. But that kind of hope is profoundly threatening to Glenn Beck and people like him. When it comes from a black man, they reach back to an old and ugly instinct.”
What Jones was saying was that Republicans play hardball better than Democrats.
I think this incident proves it, but it remains to be seen whether any of this sound and fury signifying nothing will sway the Obama administration and mainstream America away from achieving some important goals, such as health care reform and advancing climate change legislation. The Obama administration so far has been content to let the Right scream their craziness, thinking that works to his political benefit with the mainstream American voter — appalled by radicals of the right or left, and certainly when they see such vicious falsehoods being presented as news.
What we should all remember is that even though everywhere you go in Alabama it appears that just about everybody is watching Fox, that is NOT true around the rest of the country. No where near everybody in the U.S. watches Fox. Only the fringe political junkies who feed off the anger and spin really get their information there. The more crazy they get over the next four years, the more irrelevant they will become — especially if some of our major problems are actually solved.
If Obama can’t get it done because he is not willing to fight, then all is lost…
Do you really want Dick Cheney for president in 2012? This might be a good time to get off the couch. Just sayin’…
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September 7th, 2009 at 12:24 am
So this should have gotten us rid of Bush?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVynnbx1Xsc
September 7th, 2009 at 12:53 am
I signed the petition for a further investigation of 9/11 too and before that I helped them wire the World Trade Center. What’s the big deal? I think everybody knows the real story on 9/11 is classified to protect the guilty.
September 7th, 2009 at 8:51 am
The Republicans would have to take complete leave of their senses to nominate Dick Cheney to run for president, in my opinion. But it is scary to think that Cheney may be positioning himself as the “rational” alternative to Sarah Palin.
If Cheney were nominated, the campaign would be uglier than any seen so far, with all the Rovian smear tactics on steroids.
Where are the non-hysterical loyal opposition members right now? They are eerily silent and there’s no leader emerging from that group.
September 7th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Almost every establishment you go in has Fox News on. The Imagigning Center corner Gov Drive and the Pkwy has two large ones going in the hugh area as you enter, then when you go into a smaller waiting room for lab work there’s one going there.
I complained and was told they cannot change them, that it’s done from another location over which they have no control. I got the phone number, but as time wore on I forgot about it and I’m sure they’re still blaring away.
All McDonalds keep it on as does the Eye Center. Even the Vietnamese who run the finger nail shops seem addicted to it. I always ask that it be changedto CNN. They comply but look puzzled.
I complained at Krogers Pharmacy; they changed it to the History Channel and I haven’t seen Fox on there for a long time, not since I complained.
September 7th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Keep complaining! I do the same thing every chance I get : )
As for Cheney, he recently said something about running. There’s no way he could get elected. His approval rating is lower than Congress.
September 8th, 2009 at 8:49 am
This just in from Pam’s List:
Obama Has Fed His Green Jones to King CONG
by Harvey Wasserman
Van Jones has been fed to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas).
Obama’s one serious green bright spot been sacrificed at the McCarthyite altar of the corporate bloviation machine.
The brilliant, charismatic Jones was responsible for the administration’s single significant accomplishment to date. With clarity and verve Jones finally brought to the mainstream the critical message that what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy.
The convenience of this simple truth has long been known to the green power movement. Since the early 1970s we have argued that converting away from fossil and nuclear fuels–coal, oil, nukes & gas–and onto a Solartopian system based on renewables and efficiency is the only route to long-term prosperity. With community-based solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, mass transit, increased efficiency and efficiency, we can and must build a sustainable economy that will create jobs and geo-political stability.
An early articulation of this green-powered vision came at the “Toward Tomorrow” Fair at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst, in 1975. As the “No Nukes” movement was just gathering grassroots steam, we envisioned a community-based Solartopian energy system that would guarantee full employment and a survivable planet.
For the next quarter century, the No Nukes movement helped drive atomic energy into its economic and ecological black hole. As fossil fuels became ever more unsustainable, the vision took shape. Wind, solar and efficiency technologies boomed ahead.
But the multi-trillion-dollar fossil/nuke industry is nothing if not entrenched. Throughout the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush nightmare it made common wisdom of the Big Lie that saving the environment meant economic sacrifice. In fact, except for King CONG’s short-term mega-profits, the opposite has always been true.
Van Jones finally broke through. As an informed, exciting and compelling presenter, Jones made clear that the “green collar economy” is tangible and terrific. In his writings, mass meetings, television and legislative testimony, Jones turned the corner on the message that what’s good for the environment is not only good for the economy, it’s essential. Appearing with the likes of Robert Redford on Larry King, and much more, Jones finally injected into the mainstream the message that there will be no prosperity, no full employment, and no survivable planet without the necessary and do-able conversion to a green-powered Earth.
With Jones running point, Obama has in fact made millions of critical dollars available for renewable energy. The Stimulus Package does include a significant sector of cash for those wishing to bring wind, photovoltaics and other Solartopian systems into their home, office and industrial energy mix.
But we’ve seen this before. Jimmy Carter took halting steps up the Solartopian highway in the late 1970s. Tens of thousands of green jobs were created in California and elsewhere. Then Ronald Reagan ripped the solar water heater off the White House roof and Gov. George Deukmejian killed Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax credit program. The industry went into a tailspin, those thousands of jobs disappeared, and America’s dependency on foreign oil soared out of control.
With Jones gone we have to worry that Obama might now repeat history. The pretext for forcing Jones out was pathetic. Like millions of Americans he signed a petition asking for an investigation into the 9/11 felling of the World Trade Center. He used the dreaded term “asshole” to accurately describe some Republicans, and then used it to describe himself and his friends. He may have said some things that some right winger might’ve construed as racist.
Did he kill someone? Did he engage in torture? Did he steal money? Is he a lousy parent?
This is McCarthyism at its most lethal, and administrative timidity at its most dangerous. If groveling to the corporate bloviators is Obama’s strategy for making change, we are in deep deep trouble.
In fact, Van Jones, as imperfect as the rest of us, was Obama’s critical firestarter in a green-powered revolution that is decades overdue. While the likes of Glenn Beck can crow over his demise, it’s the gargantuan King CONG barons of fossil/nuke who are really in the saddle. Pushing Van Jones aside is a major coup for the destroyers of the planet, and a big loss for those of us who would re-power and save it.
We will, of course, continue to fight against fossil and nuclear power and for a green-powered Earth. But as it has been for decades, the going is rough. Will this administration really be with us?
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA: OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH
http://www.harveywasserman.com
In 1973 he helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.”