Victor Davis Hanson: Van Jones' Resignation
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]
Ah, the Dividends of a Yale Law degree:
The problems with Van “change the system” Jones are not just his serial slurs against much of American society (“an apartheid regime”) as we know it (e.g., capitalism, the coal industry, American farming, the white population, the Bush administration (for causing 9/11), the Republican “***holes”, etc. — but that he simply cannot tell the truth about his own history, in disavowing almost everything he has said, written, or signed in the recent past. (His involvement with the 9/11 “Bush did it” lunacy has a heritage beyond just his written endorsement).
Worse still, by its own admission, the Obama administration seems to have monitored Jones and selected him for his czardom precisely because of, not despite, his flamboyant past.
Cf. Obama guru Valerie Jarrett’s gush: “Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.”
Jones and other Obama radicals (the more middle- and upper-middle class the pedigree, the angrier the denunciations) have a strange tendency in the past to have slandered much of American society, then abruptly — once anointed into its highest echelons — to equate their own careerist ascendency with a positive referendum on America’s sudden deliverance (the “apartheid” U.S. in need of having its entire system “changed” is now okay since a Van Jones is in the White House.)...
... Jones’ own deprecations of the U.S. are no more extreme than Michelle Obama’s ‘downright mean country’ and for the first time she has become proud of America. When Van Jones talks about coal, he is simply amplifying Obama’s own suggestion that he would “bankrupt” those who wished to build new plants.
So I do believe Valerie Jarrett that the administration had been looking at Van Jones for a long time, and liked what they saw.
Read entire article at Private Papers (Hanson website)
The problems with Van “change the system” Jones are not just his serial slurs against much of American society (“an apartheid regime”) as we know it (e.g., capitalism, the coal industry, American farming, the white population, the Bush administration (for causing 9/11), the Republican “***holes”, etc. — but that he simply cannot tell the truth about his own history, in disavowing almost everything he has said, written, or signed in the recent past. (His involvement with the 9/11 “Bush did it” lunacy has a heritage beyond just his written endorsement).
Worse still, by its own admission, the Obama administration seems to have monitored Jones and selected him for his czardom precisely because of, not despite, his flamboyant past.
Cf. Obama guru Valerie Jarrett’s gush: “Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.”
Jones and other Obama radicals (the more middle- and upper-middle class the pedigree, the angrier the denunciations) have a strange tendency in the past to have slandered much of American society, then abruptly — once anointed into its highest echelons — to equate their own careerist ascendency with a positive referendum on America’s sudden deliverance (the “apartheid” U.S. in need of having its entire system “changed” is now okay since a Van Jones is in the White House.)...
... Jones’ own deprecations of the U.S. are no more extreme than Michelle Obama’s ‘downright mean country’ and for the first time she has become proud of America. When Van Jones talks about coal, he is simply amplifying Obama’s own suggestion that he would “bankrupt” those who wished to build new plants.
So I do believe Valerie Jarrett that the administration had been looking at Van Jones for a long time, and liked what they saw.