Santino, Never Tell Anyone Outside The Family What You're Thinking

Dan Calabrese explains “Why Van Jones Had to Go” — he exposed “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. [Near? — Ed] 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.

Hey, somebody should write a book about this stuff!

Update: Stacy McCain adds:

The astounding disproportion between the facts — who Van Jones is and what got him in trouble — and the Left’s perception tells you a lot about the what’s gone wrong in Hopeville. For all the recent uproar about Joseph Farah and “Birthers,” it is the Democratic Party which suffers most from the influence of its extremist supporters.

Jane Hamsher, Alan Colmes, and Keith Olbermann apparently live inside an echo chamber where a man who was a leader of a Marxist outfit like STORM, and who subsequently signed a 9/11 Truther petition, is not legitimately controversial. (The next time Colmes goes on Fox, somebody needs to ask him, “Hey, Alan, do you think Marxism is a bad thing?”)

Actually, I’d be more interested in Alan’s take on this.