Obama’s Radical Green Czar Ousted

In yet another example of Barack Obama’s failure to properly vet administration officials, the president’s highly touted “Green Czar” has been ousted amid controversy over his radical, racist history and the White House hasn’t bothered to defend its fallen czar but rather jubilantly showed him the door.

Van Jones, a self-described “rowdy black nationalist” turned communist was not vetted before Obama appointed him special advisor for green jobs and it blew up in the administration’s face over the weekend. The Yale Law School graduate and longtime civil rights lawyer became a communist after the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and says he loathes capitalism because it exploits nonwhite minorities worldwide. Jones is a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who became a revolutionary after meeting “young radical people of color” in jail and views police officers as the arch enemies of black people.

He publicly supported cop killer Mumia abu-Jamal (convicted in 1991 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer), signed a petition suggesting the U.S. government had a hand in the September 2001 terrorist attacks, accused “white polluters” of “environmental racism” for steering poison into poor black communities and recently referred to Republicans in vulgar terms unbecoming of a presidential advisor. The White House certainly should have taken all this into account before naming him czar. 

Because the administration didn’t adequately check Jones out, the conservative media’s expose (the so-called mainstream media largely ignored the Jones story) led to yet another embarrassment for Obama. No wonder the president essentially told his once-coveted green czar don’t let the door hit you on the way out. One of the nation’s largest newspapers confirms that White House officials never rose to Jones’ defense and took pains to distance themselves from his statements.

Even the ultra liberal paper that serves the notoriously leftwing San Francisco area criticized Obama in an editorial for missing the inflammatory aspects of Jones’ past, which it points out, raises serious questions about his vetting process. This from a publication that praises Jones’ work as a dedicated activist over the years and points out that in the politics of the San Francisco Bay Area, a fiery radical past is almost a right of passage. 

Two other Obama Administration picks resigned amid controversies that should have been discovered during the vetting process. Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle dropped his bid to be Health Secretary after being exposed for failing to pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes over the years and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson dropped out as Commerce Secretary amid a grand jury investigation into is out-of-state political donors getting a lucrative state contract.