Van Jones

Van Jones

Van Jones, President Obama's "green jobs" czar is trying to distance himself from the "9/11 truthers" -- Americans who say the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been an inside job -- releasing a statement late Thursday that says he didn't read carefully a petition he signed in 2004 calling for an investigation into the Bush administration's knowledge of an impending attack. In the statement, Van Jones also apologized again for several inflammatory remarks he made prior to joining the Obama administration, including calling Republicans "a**holes." It was his second apology in two days. For more on this story. Expect Jones to suddenly discover a desire to spend more time with his family, and soon. I’d guess Jones will be gone no later than Monday, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see his resignation get announced in a “Friday afternoon document dump.”

Van Jones has to go, and for more than just the reason that paranoid conspiracists of this type don’t belong in the White House, and certainly not as a “czar” of anything. Barack Obama will start trying to push the idea that he’s a moderate in order to rescue health-care reform, and reportedly he’s even willing to battle the left wing of the party to do it. No one will buy the idea that Obama is a moderate while he’s employing a man who thinks that George Bush murdered 3,000 people so he could grab oil and poppies from Central Asia. The man who knowingly employs a nutcase as one of his close advisers will look much more like a nutcase than a moderate. This may not have been an explicitly Truther event, but the kernels of paranoid conspiracy can certainly be found — and were certainly endorsed by Jones.

What did the White House know about Van Jones’ Trutherism and when did they know it? Charles Krauthammer asks this question and calls the revelation about the Green Jobs Czar “devastating,” much more so than an epithet directed at Republicans that most of us have used at a wide range of people. Does Barack Obama believe that it’s acceptable to have paranoid conspiracists in high-level appointments, or was the White House simply too incompetent to properly research Jones in the vetting process? Because it comes down to those two options, and regardless of what we think of Jones, the blame for him being in the White House falls squarely on Obama (via RedState)