Van "the man" Jones

Krauthammer: On Van Jones’s resignation:

It's clear that what did him in was the Truther's statement.

All the other stuff? You know, you can have a communist or two in the White House. You can have a guy who uses expletives about the opposition. But you can't have somebody in government that believes there was a Bush conspiracy to allow — to deliberately allow — 9/11. That is beyond the pale. It is a rancid paranoid politics that is beyond radicalism.

If that hadn't happened, I suspect he would still be in office. So that is what did him in.

And here he is protesting it was a smear campaign and lies. If they were all lies, why did he apologize twice?

And then secondly, you get him or his defenders saying that he didn't carefully read the petition. The petition is quite easy to read and plain. It speaks about the government officials who may have deliberately allowed the 9/11 attack.

Now, this is a guy who has been touted as a graduate of Yale Law School. So where is the fine print here? Where is the ambiguity? And the difficulty? And the difficult syntax that he couldn't decipher?

I assure you that any of the schoolchildren that Obama will be addressing tomorrow would read it and understand it. So his explanation is completely incredible. He obviously knew what he was signing. And that's what did him in at 12:01 on a Sunday, usually the time for executions…

What you also learn about the White House is when [White House adviser Valerie] Jarrett said, as we saw on tape, "We've been watching him all these years," well, that means you have been watching him and must know something about his history of quite radical politics and statements.

And that apparently was undisturbing to Jarrett and to Obama people. And that tells you it is a reflection of the boss. The boss also had a history, before he became a candidate, of being around — and friends with the — likes of Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers.

Liberals scolded us last year [about] how irrelevant all of that is, how it is a smear campaign against Obama. But if you live in that environment and you find nothing inherently wrong with that kind of radicalism, then a Van Jones will show up, you will watch him years and years, and you will think this guy is perfectly mainstream.

Revealing Convergence: Van Jones and the Education Speech [Lisa Schiffren]

In addition to revealing those of his views that should preclude executive-branch employment, and those of his views that should be shared only with a few very close, very like-minded intimates lest they seem inflammatory to normal voters, Van Jones was certainly not very discreet about how hard he worked to obtain the first-rate Yale law degree that was his entrée into big-time lefty politics. It’s worth reading all of this fascinating interview in a sympathetic Bay Area publication, in which he reveals his own regard for the transformative power of education. :

I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was almost unheard of for students coming from the kind of public schools that I was coming from in the rural South. I was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn't have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I'm guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hell raiser student, and they can't do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.