No One Should Be Surpised About Jones

Andrew McCarthy has written today on NRO’s The Corner:

For anyone with common sense and a willingness to look at what we were allowed to learn about Obama's background and associations, nothing about Van Jones is the least bit surprising. Nothing about Obama's penchant for government by radical, unaccountable czars is the least bit surprising. What is surprising is that smart people continue to treat these developments as if they were abberations that somehow happen independent of Obama, as if the president just needs to do a better job of vetting staffers. The selection of Van Jones is who Obama is and what he is about. Bad things are not happening to our president; our president is doing bad things — as we should have known he would.

The Politics of Poseurs

Mark Steyn had this to say in NRO’s Corner:

Megan McArdle writes:

If the right ever wants to get back in power, it needs to start policing its lunatic fringe.

Er, okay. But the left is in power, and it's got Van Jones the Truther in the White House. Which isn't exactly the "fringe". More of a lunatic mainstream, isn't it? Which may be why The New York Times et al have decided there's no story.

Years ago, Canada's Kathy Shaidle made a very good point about "9/11 Was An Inside Job" types like Czar Jones:

I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?

Is Van Jones a real Truther or a faux Truther? The White House position is that he's the latter - hey, he just glanced at it, saw it was some routine impeach-Bush-for-killing-thousands-of-his-fellow-Americans thing, and signed it without reading it; we've all been there, right?

Van Jones Trutherism, like Van Jones Communism and Van Jones Eco-Racism Theory, is a kind of decadence: If you really believed 9/11 was an inside job, you'd be in fear of your life. Instead, for a cutting-edge poseur like Jones, it's a marketing niche, one that gives you a certain cachet with the right kind of people - like, apparently, Barack Obama. (Bill Clinton, to his credit, felt differently.)

I think Steyn is right. When I found out Jones’s name was on that Truther site, I figured he didn’t believe a word of it. Just as Steyn guesses, Jones just lent his name because he wanted to be known as a Bush-hater in the right circles, and what the hell, the truth doesn’t matter.

Which is much more despicable than being a Truther. And I think this administration is just full of people like Van Jones.