How cute of CBS to asterisk the s's, and mount the video uncensored. I loved the questioner's reaction and the crowd's.

"2. Ed Asner, actor, activist"

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/up/

I'm always suspicious of anyone quoting Niemoller, because first, Niemoller equated moral authority with personal identity, and second because Niemoller's famous quote is just a dressed up "slippery slope" argument.

Also, Glenn Beck isn't the Gestapo, he's a loudmouth television entertainer.

Now, I don't have a strong opinion about Van Jones either way. I have no interest in ever meeting or speking to the man (I'm sure I'd find him to be tinfoil hattish), but I don't think he should necessarily be barred from public service.

But that isn't to say I -want- him in public service, any more than I want Glenn Beck in public service. They're BOTH nuts. And of course, anyone thinking about public service ought to be suspicious of self proclaimed "revolutionaries" full stop.

Glenn Beck and Van Jones represent the lunatic fringe, and their activities are politics, pure and simple. Glenn Beck isn't Joe McCarthy; people (LOTS of people) took McCarthy seriously because there was a real threat (the Soviet Union).

As much as Green for All may be nutjobs, they aren't as scary as Stalin. And people know that.

Nate doesn't quite tell the whole story. For one thing, the 9-11 group is more than just critcizing the government for "ignoring warnings". They are making broader claims that 9-11 was a "cover-up" that the government knew about. They are part of the "truthers" that think the government orchestrated the attacks.

And Jones is more than just a "diverse view" unless you'd say the same thing about Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

I'm not sure why he needs to bring race into his "green jobs" role by saying things like - "the white polluers and the white environmentalists steering poison into the people of color communities"

This should be a useful way to combat the Birther embarrassment that this site and others have spent so much time mocking. It's such an excellent reply to point out a real life Troofer pretty high up in the Obama administration. Thanks for the ammo Van and Nathan!

Nate also forgot to mention Jones' comments about Columbine:

“You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, ‘We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.’ It’s only them. Now, a black kid might shoot another black kid. He’s not going to shoot up the whole school. ‘My cousin’s up in here; I ain’t gonna shoot up my whole school!”

Go check it out on YouTube.

It is astonishing to read the comments on this blog: the shouting is so loud I can't hear what you are trying to say. Perhaps you are used to the style of argumentation in which the claim dangles without supporting arguments. So let's clear away the smoke, if we can, and see where people stand. I am going to ask a series of questions. First, it seems that some of you feel that a person who has expressed doubt about the U.S. governments' official version of events on Sept. 11, 2001 is unfit for public service. Since Mr. Jones did in fact sign a petition that expressed such doubt, do those of you, such as MiddleClassBill, who seem so sure of yourselves, believe that Americans should have to take "loyalty test" which consists of adherence to some officially expressed version of events from that terrible day?

I expect Nathan Newman may write more about this, and I hope he does. I just note with sadness that the AP has announced Van Jones' resignation. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post's story.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean rallied to Jones' defense, saying he had signed the controversial 9-11 "Truther" petition by mistake.

"I think he was brought down. It's too bad," Dean said. "I think it's a loss for the country."

The one FOX guest who didn't comment on Jones' departure? Center for American Progress president John Podesta, at whose think tank Jones served as a senior fellow before joining the White House

Cheers for Dean, Boos for Podesta. And for the Obama Administration, sometimes calculating political losses is not the honorable thing to do. This is one of those times.

absurd: (definition from Merriam-Webster 2009): adj, 1) ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous ; 2) having no rational or orderly relationship to human life, SYN-> 'meaningless', also: lacking order or value; 3) dealing with the absurd or with absurdism.

It is exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Van Jones was forced out of the White House for ascribing to Congressional Republicans the quality of being "assholes" [sic]. Rahm Emmanuel has been taped using the same words at least 14 times since 2006. And since former Vice President Cheney told a member of the media to go fornicate with himeself, in more direct terms, on camera, it seems like even ideologues might find it difficult to make the case that Mr. Jones should lose his job over a moment of sarcasm. After, many Republicans here where I live marvel at the intransigence and sheer cussedness of some of those in the Washington, D.C. brand of Republican, "empire-first" politics. The sheer hypocrisy of incumbents from both parties who have voted against funding for the development of new sources of energy, again, and again, begs for an answer.

So lets again, talk about the likely real reason why Mr. Jones was slandered and made to leave public service, his association with the now infamous petition for renewed investigation into the criminal events of Sept. 11, 2001, and by extension, as "MiddleClassBill" made so clear in his post this morning, the policies of the "9/11 Truth" group itself. For that is what the firing cum "resignation" of Mr. Jones represents: a clear message from Podesta, Emmanuel and other inside power brokers that Americans who question the official government narrative about what happened on Sept. 11 2001 are unfit to serve this country. And that should make all of you VERY concerned. Nathan Newman's use of the term McCarthyite is frightenly apt: we are again on the cusp of identifying "internal enemies" : Perception wants to triumph over Logos.

So let's deal with absurdity, since M.C. Bill decided to enforce the vocabulary of his masters in his post this morning, and since it is now frighteningly clear to every federal employee (at least to those in the executive branch) that they question a dominant government narrative at peril of their job. Mr. M.C. Bill pointed out that the goals of the truth petition include language that seems to accuse the U.S. government of culpability in the attacks of 9/11. In fact, Mr. M.C. Bill also pointed out that while he is O.K. with an investigation into what failures occurred in the U.S. counter-terrorism community prior to 9/11, the position that any elements of the U.S. government could have assisted the attacks or even orchestrated them is "absurd".

Indeed. This is the safe perspective. It is the necessary perspective in order to keep one's "orderly relationship to human life": to believe that the U.S. government may be responsible, far more than it wants to reveal, for the crimes of 9/11/01, as well as the subsequent actions for which that day provides the requisite cover, is indeed to suggest positions that are "incongruous" with the most basic notions that Americans wish to hold dear about their government.

It is ironic, then, is it not, that thousands of American conservatives are at this very moment mobilizing, polarizing, preparing for the VERY POSSIBILITY, at least in their heads, that the "socialist administration" will indeed attack Americans in order to justify the imposition of a "New Health Care Order". In fact, on the same media outlets where Mr. Jones was vilified and the trial balloon of his firing was floated, incendiary rhetoric is daily thrown around that invokes the spectre of an American government attack on its own people and thus justifying the call for an uprising to defend "American values."

If these perspectives were advocated instead, with the appropriate language targets re-polarized from a liberal instead of "conservative" viewpoint, and broadcast nationally, so-called "conservatives" would be howling for blood.

We live in strange times: in fact, we live in absurd times. Thank you for the word, M.C. Bill: but its power will illuminate far more than you are comfortable with. I too, lost scores of people in the terror attacks of 9/11/01, and my blood has always boiled at the shameless exploitation of that event by members of both parties for political gain.

But the truth(s) of life in America are far more absurd than the questions of the so-called "truthers". One of the basic questions that one must grapple with, if only to come to basic recognition of the absurdity of American political life in 2009, is the question of Empire. Our republic has an Empire. The dictates of the policies necessary to maintain and expand that empire may in fact overwhelm the engines of representative government, while satraps within the sovereignty pattern stimulate events in order to flush out dissent and discover threats to hegemony. What happens in the capital city of such a dual republic/empire over time is a kind of mimesis: representatives of the state find themselves in the paradoxes first explored by Eubulides in the 4th century B.C. The Liar's Paradox: also known as the pseudomenon, in which you find yourself uttering statements that seemingly show your common beliefs about truth and falsity actually leading to contradictions.

Such is the case about 9/11. What M.C. Bill and others who enforce the consensus viewpoint are trapped in is a version of the Liar's Paradox. "The U.S. Government never acts at cross-purposes, and it would not be possible for members of the U.S. to plan attacks against its citizens in order to accomplish policy goals, because that would mean this statement is false."

The resolution of Liar's Paradoxes require that we transform "semantically" closed languages and accept the possibility of "bivalent" statements: it is possible for a statement about reality to be BOTH false and true. There are levels of language, just as there are levels of reality.

So third question: is the U.S. government a monolith? Or is it possible to conduct covert operations that take advantage of the "shield of protection" that the government offers in order to conduct affairs that the light of legislative or citizen discovery would find odious?

And if members of the U.S. government, already accustomed to using government contractors to accomplish tasks that would definitely not survive legislative oversight, needed to expand the Empire, might they contract out, offering their protection to said contractors when necessary, the odious task of staging a domestic terror event?

One of the worst results of the "meme wars" going on in Washington, D.C. and across this country is how environmentalism is being demonized. I just finished watching Glenn Beck, and his shameless idiocy about DDT "being good for you" was transparent enough not to obscure the real truth behind the Van Jones firing. David Sirota pointed out out this morning on Huffington Post that the logic of the hacks in the Obama White House will backfire: "resigning" (like "suiciding") Jones will only embolden the radicals who call themselves "conservatives". In fact, the Jones story is an opening salvo in a new war by so-called "conservatives" against the entire program of building a more sustainable society.

In fact, the story of Mr. Jones, before he was savagely attacked and left to die by the Obama White House, is a story of a man, who struggled to find a means to contribute to an American system that has deep and pervasive failures. The story of Mr. Jones is not that of a closet Marxist, but instead of someone who asked, how can we encourage the deeply flawed capitalist system of the United States to create jobs that will lead to a flourishing economy that also has improves our environment? The cynical and shameless attack on him is about far more than simply his support of a petition that questions the official narrative on 9/11. As I describe below, the "conservative" movements in this country are gripped by a directive to attack all resolution of the artificial war between "economy" and "ecology" as "Communist". Who is issuing this directive? A clue might consist in examining the news that in recent weeks, the U.S. Chambers of Commerce announced at the Business Roundtable that they were devoting substantial resources to fighting both health care reform and climate-change legislation. Look there for the marching orders that filter through the actions of men driven by cynical passion such as Phil Kerpen, one of the authors of the script for Mr. Jone's expulsion from public service.

A few minutes ago, on Fox News, Phil Kerpen just revealed to a broader public the exact modus operandi and proschemata (Thucydides, in War of the History of the Peloponnesian War, who identified fear, honor and interest as three primary reasons why wars are waged, while proschemata are the often false pretexts for conflict -- see 'casus belli') of the attack on Van Jones. Emboldened by a theory that many "conservatives" have that there is a "red-green" or "watermelon" agenda to the environmental movement, Mr. Kerpen spent two weeks researching everything he could on Mr. Jones. In touch with one of the producers of Mr. Beck's show, Mr. Kerpen reveals that his real target is the "Apollo Alliance...the national umbrella organization for coordinating between the environmentalists, the labor unions, and the social justice street organizers that Jones has served as a board member and a primary national spokesman for...." Gleefully, Mr. Kerpen outlines here http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/09/06/phil-kerpen-van-jones-resign/ how he has identified the "real agenda" behind the creation of green jobs: " (quote from FOXnews above)
: "the push for "green jobs" has everything to do with funding the far-left political activities that Van Jones so adamantly believed in. Green jobs are not economic jobs but political jobs, designed to funnel vast sums of taxpayer money to left-wing labor unions, environmental groups, and social justice community organizers."
This is political war, folks. We live in absurd times, where the worst are 'slouching towards Bethlehem' and 'the center does not hold'. Instead, the fringe is funded and amplified to become the mainstream, and anyone who exemplifies the process of mature political evolution from radicalism toward true public service, such as Mr. Jones, is attacked and blacklisted. The "anti-communist" meme code, buried like a meningitis virus deep in the spinal cord of American politics, has been activated, and it will not rest until either: it has exhausted its virulent devastation of people's energy and emotion, or, like the Army attorney, Mr. Welch, who finally opposed Joe McCarthy in April 1954: ""Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?""