|
Dan
Calabrese
Read Dan's bio and previous columns here
September 7, 2009
Why Van Jones Had to
Go: Exposing the Left’s Family Secrets
If
you want to avoid making headlines with your resignation-under-pressure,
it would be hard to pick a better time than around midnight on a
Saturday night during a holiday weekend. But then again, the controversy
surrounding Van Jones hadn’t been making much in the way of news
coverage anyway.
President Obama’s so-called “green czar” turns out to have been a 9/11
truther with near-communist ideological proclivities. He had called for
a revolution against the U.S. government, and perhaps least troubling of
all, had referred to Republicans as “assholes.”
Hey, some are.
Even though the story was completely ignored by the New York Times,
the major networks and most other members of the dying old-guard media,
Jones’s radical affiliations generated enough buzz on Fox News and
Internet-based media that the White House could feel the heat
nonetheless.
The real reason Jones had to go was not his ideas per se. He thinks the
way President Obama thinks. Jones had to go because his presence in the
administration revealed so much about how the left operates – and these
are supposed to be closely guarded family secrets.
Perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious statement about Jones
came from the Washington Post in its wee-hours Sunday
morning coverage of Jones’s resignation:
Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had
worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality since March.
He was a civil-rights activist in California before turning his focus to
environmental and energy issues, and he won wide praise before joining
the Obama administration for articulating a broad vision of a green
economy Democrats could embrace.
This is hilarious because you’d think from reading it that Jones just
happened to develop this new interest, environmental and energy issues,
and changed careers. And he became so good at his new career that he got
a job advising the president on it!
All Jones did was adjust the focus of the same “career” he’d always had
– that of radical left-wing activist – to focus on pushing the latest
fashionable excuse for all the same policies the left always wants.
The “revolution” Jones seeks would re-order the entire economy to take
state control of private wealth and redistribute it to the hapless
proletariat. This is the same agenda the Democratic Party has embraced
for more than a generation, offering whatever excuse might sell the
idea. They’ve been trying to sell poverty and health care as excuses to
do this since at least the 1960s. Even the anti-war movement is, at
least in part, about wanting to re-allocate the Pentagon budget for
social do-gooder programs administered by the agencies and nonprofits
that employ so many of these people.
Now the environment is the excuse to impose massive new taxes and
regulations on industry.
It’s all to accomplish the same thing, and that’s why Jones the
civil-rights activist became Jones the environmental activist. Every
problem that has ever existed is solved by massive taxes and government
regulation, and Jones – formidable radical activist that he is – knew
how to pivot from issue to issue while really pursuing the same end
goal.
That’s why he had to go. The career of Van Jones is a microcosm of the
American left itself. It is always pursuing the same goal –
redistribution of wealth through the favored vehicles of federal
agencies, nonprofits and labor unions – and is always ready with a new
excuse for why we need to do this.
Of
course, in the past, a Democratic administration could have employed
lots of people like Van Jones, because the establishment media would not
report on his radicalism (nor did it do so on this occasion) and there
was no non-traditional media to do the job in their stead. Who knows how
many guys like this wandered the halls of the federal government during
the Carter and Clinton administrations?
It’s a new age, though, and it’s hard for President Obama to pretend he
is a mainstream thinker when one of his “czars” is all over YouTube
calling for a revolution, and signing 9/11 truther petitions.
Then again, there are plenty of Obama’s own radical statements – about
single-payer health care, disarmament and lots of other juicy items –
floating around on the Internet as well. Maybe now that we know a little
more about the kind of people he brings on board to work in his
administration, people might start to consider that Obama, too, meant
the radical things he said in the past. And still does.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Become
Dan's friend on Facebook.
To book Dan as a
speaker for your group's event,
contact Lourdes Swarts at Speakers Access.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # DC314. Request permission to publish here. |
