Defending Van Jones Would Be a Bad Idea

Barack Obama is not a communist. And because Barack Obama is not a communist, he's obligated to defend an advisor who was prepared to use his office as a means of incrementally implimenting communism.

If one applies their critical thinking skills to Paul Jay's interview with Democrat Donna Edwards on The Real News network, this is a theme that quickly emerges.

In the video, Jay and Edwards commiserate over Barack Obama's failure to defend Van Jones, his Green Jobs csar who recently resigned after a media campaign by FOX News personality Glenn Beck.

"I think that it demonstrates that the opponents to President Obama and to the kind of change he promised to deliver for the American people are relentless," Edwards complained. "The fact that they went after Van Jones is just another demonstration of that."

"This administration, and as we as progressives, can't be sidelined and sidetracked by people who are attacking folks in the administration for things they said before they were appointed into their offices," Edwards continued. "I think it's actually been a real shame."

For her own part, Edwards blames evil corporations.

"The reality that the corporate interests were so opposed to what he's trying to do around energy and the President's agenda around energy reform, that's why they went after him," Edwards explained. "They would have found any reason to go after Van Jones or after anyone else because they don't like the President's energy agenda."

Of course it doesn't help Edwards one bit that Jones very much was the architect of his own discredit.

No one held a gun to Van Jones' head and forced him to gush about the green movement as an incrementalist agenda toward communism.

In her own way, Edwards is right to note similarities between how individuals like Glenn Beck (and there are, no doubt, some strains of lunacy within his own comments about Jones) and others went after Obama and how they went after Jones.

The problem for Edwards is that, as it regards Jones, they were very much accurate.

Despite what individuals like Glenn Beck have to say about him, Barack Obama is far from a political radical or a communist. So for Obama to pull out all the stops from someone who has described himself as both a political radical and a communist (with a potential 9/11 "truth"er thrown in to boot) would probably be about the most foolish thing he could do. He would, in fact, be playing directly into the hands of people like Sean Hannity.

This is all aside from the fact that Van Jones clearly hasn't been entirely earnest with his intentions in regard to the Green Jobs program.

Perhaps Van Jones is the hill that Donna Edwards would like to die on, but Barack Obama is not obligated to charge off into that particular battle.

Back to Square One for Eco-Opportunists

Van Jones resignation a set-back for cynical environmentalists

In what has turned out to be a spectacular collapse of vetting, Barack Obama's Green Jobs csar, Van Jones, resigned from his office yesterday.

Within Jones' troublesome past was his defense of a known cop killer, racially charged comments about schoolyard shootings and his status as a signatory to a 9/11 "truth" website.

Particularly troublesome in regard to the manner in which Jones was serving the administration were his comments about "maximum and minimum goals" in regard to environmental policy.

"Right now we're saying that we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to some kind of eco-capitalism where at least we aren't fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet," Jones had explained.

"Will that be enough? No it won't be enough," Jones coninued. "We want to go beyond systems of exploitation and oppression altogether."

"Green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society," he explained.

To date, the brazen accusations that Barack Obama is some kind of communist have been nothing short of empty hysteria. But in the specific case of Van Jones, it certainly seems like he's calling for some kind of "incremental communist revolution".

But Jones isn't the first person to allow an ulterior motive for their environmental policies to slip.

Meanwhile, just a few months before the 2008 federal election, which then-Liberal party leader Stephane Dion fought on the back of his Green Shift policy, then-Thunder Bay Rainy River MP Ken Boshcoff let the cat out of the bag when he speculated that the carbon tax could be used to transfer wealth out of oil-producing provinces to the rest of the country.

"The shift will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oilpatch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians," Boshcoff wrote in a blogpost. "Clearly, I feel it would be an expansion of prosperity nationwide. Everybody wants to share in Alberta's good fortune."

Across the Atlantic Ocean in Britain, meanwhile, one finds George Monbiot (the zoologist that Elizabeth May gushed over while divulging the true content of her character).

Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning. In it, Monbiot essentially argues that unless stopped soon, climate change will enter a self-perpetuating stage.

Before heat, however, he wrote Manifesto for a New World Order, in which he argues in favour of establishing a "World Parliament".

Monbiot is well known to be an advocate of the Kyoto protocol. But just as, for Van Jones environmentalism was just an incrementalist movement toward supplanting capitalism and for Ken Boshcoff the carbon shift was a method of siphoning wealth out of Western Canada, Monbiot's support for Kyoto was simply an incrementalist approach to establishing a precedent for a World Parliament with actual governmental powers.

If individuals like Jones, Boshcoff and Monbiot really considered the allegedly-imminent alleged catastrophe of climate change to be so serious one would suspect that they could at least do a better job of concealing their individual ulterior motives.