freelansing in Seattle

I was going to write about something else this week, but the ouster of green-jobs adviser Van Jones from the Obama administration has me livid. It’s just so wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

Of course the smear campaign by the right-wing noise machine, led by Glenn Beck, was ugly. Distortions and misrepresentations about relatively trivial incidents in Jones’ past were twisted into an aggressive and relentless campaign of race-baiting and red-baiting. Beck, simultaneously channelling both Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, called Jones a “communist” and “Black nationalist” who hates white people and is plotting to destroy America from inside the White House. Another scary black radical, like Rev. Wright, to prove how truly dangerous Obama’s agenda is. (Tim Wise clearly articulates the nasty racial dimension of the smear campaign here.)

Such far-right demagoguery is certainly ugly, but predictable. That such inflammatory rhetoric succeeds in frightening and agitating a significant sector of the populace is also ugly but predictable. You can still fool some of the people all of the time.

But some of the people is not most of the people. A vocal minority, to be sure (whose voices are amplified by the right-wing echo chamber), but essentially we’re talking about just a subset of the people who—let’s remember—lost the election. So how do they end up shaping so much of our current political discourse? And how, in this instance, did they win? How did they succeed in ousting a man Time magazine named as an “environmental hero” in 2008 & one of the “100 most influential people in the world” in 2009 through such a transparently dishonest campaign of fear-mongering?

That’s where the story got really ugly.

Obama bears much responsibility (as David Roberts at Grist notes in an insightful analysis), showing his willingness to sacrifice one the best and most progressive people in his administration for political expediency. Van Jones was not just well-qualified to lead a national program of green jobs development, he literally wrote the book on it. Instead of defending Jones as the best man for the job, and calling out his critics for waging a dishonest smear campaign based on relatively trivial incidents, the White House left Jones to twist in the wind for weeks, apologizing (twice) and finally resigning on Sept. 5.

After the resignation, the Washington Post reported that one administration official confided, “He was not as thoroughly vetted as other administration officials,” implying that Jones’ past would have somehow disqualified him for the job.

The White House response just lent credibility to Beck’s specious charges, implicitly conceding that they were legitimate causes for removal. Ironically, one the transgressions Beck had seized on was a time Jones had once called Republicans “assholes.” The context was in the observation that Republicans often get their way by being assholes, and that maybe Democrats needed more “assholes” who would stand up to them and fight back.

Obama let the assholes win again. As any schoolchild knows, when you let bullies get their way through bullying, you just embolden them to be bigger bullies in the future. The right-wing witch hunt has just begun (more on this later).

While encouraging giving aid & comfort to the rabid right, Obama also signaled to progressives (again) that they are expendable.

But it wasn’t just the White House that abandoned Jones. Liberal and environmental groups that had previously heralded Jones as a hero for his genius at uniting environmental and social justice causes and framing popular solutions were eerily quiet, as Jane Hamsher notes, describing the cozy, obedient relationship that DC liberal groups have developed with the Obama administration.

Jones did get more support at the grassroots from smaller progressive groups outside the Beltway, and a Facebook group called “I Stand with Van Jones” grew quickly, but it was all too little, too late.

Behind the scenes we see more ugliness: The attack on Van Jones didn’t start in the deranged mind of Glenn Beck; it was initiated & orchestrated by policy director of Americans for Prosperity, a front group for big industry, whose priority is to undermine energy reform. They see clean energy and green jobs as a major threat, so attacked the administration’s ablest advocate, as reported at Mother Jones & Alternet.

So, we have a well-funded industry advocacy organization trying to remove government officials inimical to industry interests feeding information to a professional demagogue given a platform for his demagoguery by one of the biggest media moguls in the world; meanwhile the White House, elected into a position of power by the majority of voters, acts powerless to stop this witch hunt by a vocal minority, while erstwhile organizational allies, with the power to mount a counter-campaign, stand by in silence. And of course, the mainstream corporate media does nothing to clarify any of the real issues involved. Is this a great country or what?

This is not the end of the story. The very next day after Jones resigned, Phil Kerpen, the AFP hack that first fed info to Beck, was crowing about the “victory” and plotting next steps in blocking the whole energy reform agenda. Beck has meanwhile successfully taken out another administration official, getting Yosi Sargeant removed from his post as communications director at the National Endowment for the Arts. And he has created a list of other administration officials to go after. Now that the sharks have tasted blood, the attacks will only become more aggressive.

It’s a sad state of affairs when someone like Van Jones gets branded a dangerous extremist and loses his job while a truly dangerous extremist like Glenn Beck get to keep his. So if the rabid right can get Jones removed, the question is, can progressives get Beck removed from his job? Color of Change, an organization Jones co-founded years ago, has mounted a campaign to get corporate sponsors to pull their ads from Beck’s show, and have had considerable success. You can join the campaign here.

As for Jones himself, he’ll be fine. An organizer at heart, he’s likely to be happier and quite possibly more effective outside of Washington bureaucracy. The real damage is to national energy policy and America’s political culture.