Unbelievable: Van Jones says 9/11 petition didn’t reflect his views; Update: Jones didn’t “carefully review” petition

posted at 9:59 pm on September 3, 2009 by Allahpundit

Note well: He doesn’t deny that he signed it. He denies that he agrees with it. Which means, I guess, that he’s asking us to create a new standard for public officials by which documents that bear their signature should no longer be used against them.

Imagine the contempt you’d need to have for the intelligence of your audience to try a non-defense like this:

In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of “the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”

He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition.

“My work at the Council on Environmental Quality is entirely focused on one goal: building clean energy incentives which create 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and use renewable resources,” Jones said in his statement tonight.

Jones also said in his statement that “In recent days some in the news media have reported on past statements I made before I joined the administration – some of which were made years ago. If I have offended anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize.”

That’s the second apology he’s made in two days; at this rate, it’d be faster and easier to issue a statement retracting everything he ever said in his life prior to being hired by Obama. As for the non-denial denial, remember that the Washington Times already contacted 9/11 Truth this morning to ask them if Jones’s name could have ended up on the petition mistakenly. The response:

9/11Truth.org spokesman Mike Berger told the Washington Times over the phone that all of the signers had been verified by their group. He said 9/11Truth.org board members “spoke with each person on the list by phone or through email or individually confirm they hae added their name to that list.”

“I think in most cases they spoke to them personally,” he added. “No one’s name was put on that list without them knowing it.”

Three possibilities. One: The Truthers are lying and simply added names of activists like Jones who, um, no one had ever heard of when the petition was circulated in 2004. If that’s true, it’s curious that people like Ed Asner and Janeane Garofalo, whose names are also on there, apparently haven’t objected in the five years since. Two: As I said in the Beck post, maybe Jones doesn’t actually believe the theory but signed on for the sheer romantic rebel pseudo-intellectual glory of it. In that case, we’re in the same situation as we were with Ron Paul when he denied having written the racist crap in those old Ron Paul newsletters: Even if he’s telling the truth, the fact that he approved it proves he’s either too stupid or careless to be trusted with power. Or three: Jones is lying. Unless the correct answer is number one — and it’s mighty curious that Jones isn’t saying it is — then he’s got to go. Pull the trap door, Barry.

Update: Krauthammer, Mara Liasson, and Steve Hayes all think he’ll be gone by Monday. And that was before he put out this statement. He must want that czar job awfully bad, though, to put The One through this PR trip, which has now reached Tapper at ABC News and is bound to spread tomorrow.

Update: The spin gets lamer. I say again: Unbelievable.

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The past doesn’t matter. Soon, it will all be scrubbed. He is singing “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see”. Nothing matters now that he has received the healing touch of “The One, The Messiah”.

Stupid people. Just shutup and do what we say. And those lefty loons called Bush a fascist!

sgtstogie on September 4, 2009 at 1:02 PM

I don’t care what the man has to say. Van is hot!

Chekote on September 4, 2009 at 3:16 AM

Oh, good. The intellectuals are here.

nico on September 4, 2009 at 1:19 PM

Mr Obama, this is what you end up with by trying to “keep it real”.
This a$$clown has no business being anywhere near the White House.

FireBlogger on September 4, 2009 at 1:33 PM

Van has the qualifications for becoming a great Democrat Congressman, he signs without reading!

CA_Conservative on September 4, 2009 at 1:38 PM

This guy is just like Barry O. You can tell when he’s lying. His lips are moving.

TrickyDick on September 4, 2009 at 1:39 PM

To the jug-eared turdball being a communist and a truther are probably resume-enhancers. The only reason Ogabe would fire Jones is as a political calculation that Jones is a liability and continued attention will blunt his fascist plans.
Odumbo needs to decide if the force of his will is enough to carry the day or if he needs to buy some credibility by dumping his communist BFF.

SKYFOX on September 4, 2009 at 1:40 PM

The political radicalization of Van Jones, President Obama’s “green jobs” adviser, dates back to 1992, when he and hundreds of others took their anger to the streets of San Francisco in the infamous Rodney King protests.

Jones, a Yale Law School student who was working in the Bay Area as an intern, was part of a mob that stormed the city following the acquittal in Los Angeles of four white police officers who had been charged with beating King, who is black, after a car chase.

In an essay he wrote soon after the rioting and republished in The Huffington Post in May 2007, Jones said he “just marched around and chanted slogans” as other protesters set trash cans afire, smashed car windows and threw rocks at passing motorists. But he clearly reveled in the protest.

“Our moment had finally come! We were righteous, fired up, weren’t takin’ no more!” Jones wrote. “We were one thousand strong on Market Street, with the Bay Bridge shut down in rush hour traffic and the grounds around the state building swarming with angry mobs! Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand was that the System be changed!”

Jones continued, “Yes, the Great Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was ours! So we stole stuff. Y’know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes. Well, not everybody, of course.”

ted c on September 4, 2009 at 2:09 PM

“But the incident deepened my disaffection with the system and accelerated my political radicalization,” he wrote. “The political agenda I articulated for myself and my generation in this essay remains largely undone and incomplete.”

Indeed, Jones’ “disaffection with the system” appeared to continue. In a June 2008 speech to the National Conference for Media Reform, Jones blasted a proposed prison in Memphis that he compared to a “huge slave ship on dry land.”

“You don’t have to call somebody the n-word if you can call them a felon,” Jones said in the speech, which can be seen on YouTube . “The fight against this new Jim Crow, this punishment industry, where for-profit prison companies are now being traded on the stock exchange … that struggle is being met as it was 40 years ago.”

In his 2007 reflection on the aftermath of King’s beating, Jones said he was among those who chanted “no justice, no peace” during the “understandable, unavoidable, even necessary” riots.

“These riots were not revolution; without revolutionary values and revolutionary organization, they were merely sharp outcroppings of the systemic chaos that social injustice breeds,” Jones wrote. “But flashpoints of rage can never substitute for radical social vision or grassroots coordination.”

Jones, the founder of Green for All, which focuses on creating environmentally friendly jobs in poor areas, continues to be a focus of President Obama’s critics after video surfaced of him referring to Republicans as “assholes” and it was revealed that he once joined the “9/11 truther” movement, which contended that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks might have been an inside job by the Bush administration.

In 2004 Jones signed a statement calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggests “people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

The statement asked a series of critical questions hinting at Bush administration involvement in the attacks and called for “deeper inquiry.” It was also signed by former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.

Jones distanced himself from the position on Thursday, saying, “In recent days some in the news media have reported on past statements I made before I joined the administration — some of which were made years ago. If I have offended anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize. As for the petition [9/11 statement] that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”

ted c on September 4, 2009 at 2:12 PM

Hee hee. This is going to be fun!

NathanG on September 4, 2009 at 2:28 PM

From Jeff Lord at the americanspectator.com

Here are the questions Glenn Beck and others should be asking, based on my own personal experience:

• Who on the White House staff cleared Van Jones?

• What was that person’s connection to Van Jones or Mr. Jones’s political sponsor?

• Who, exactly, was Mr. Jones’ sponsor for this job? How much money did he/she contribute to the Obama campaign?

• Did the Secret Service notify anyone on the White House staff — or the President or First Lady or Vice President Biden — that Mr. Jones had an arrest record on file with police in two cities?

• Did the Secret Service protest any of this, objecting to Mr. Jones’ clearance?
• If the Secret Service did object, who overruled them? The President? The Chief of Staff? Someone else?

• If the answer to this last question is yes, and the Secret Service was overruled by the President or someone else, why did this happen?

• The White House is a busy place. But there are always answers to questions like these.

ted c on September 4, 2009 at 2:32 PM

AprilOrit on September 4, 2009 at 2:05 AM
And your point being……..????

GrannyDee on September 4, 2009 at 2:28 AM

She made a whopping mistake…she’s done, the Far Right will/has/did plummet her into oblivion and beyond.

AprilOrit on September 4, 2009 at 3:03 PM

He’s gotta go. Where are the spineless GOP members of Congress demanding this thug’s firing? Where the hell are they?

I Love Mark Levin !!!

CEA_Agent on September 4, 2009 at 3:49 PM

I will repeat again: Ralph Nader’s name is on the very same list, and I doubt any of you, including Krauthammer, would call him a Truther.

Seixon on September 4

Most consider Ralph Nader to be a loon. A passionate and honest loon, but a loon nonetheless.

Others on the list.

Medea Benjamin, activist, author, co-founder, Global Exchange and Code Pink LOON!

Stan Goff Socialist writer, speaker, and consultant, identifies his politics as “heavily influenced by Marxism, feminism, ecology, and revolutionary Black nationalism
Affiliations, Member of International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic – September 2002.

Dr. Robert Bowman, USAF Lt. Col. (Rtd.), founder

BTW, does anybody know when the USAF adopted the “fictional abbreviation” for Lieutenant colonel?

Army LTC (Note: 3 letters, not 4 letters)
Marine Corps LtCol (Note: 4 letters, no space tween T and C)
Navy CDR (note: Comander. The Navy doesn’t have “Colonels”)
Air Force Lt Col (Note: 4 letters, WITH space tween T and C, but NO periods after T and C.)

The only place you will see Lieutenant colonel abbreviated Lt. Col. Is in fiction, like Hollywood.

Examples
Lt. Col. Henry Blake of the film and television series M*A*S*H (should be LTC, not Lt. Col.)
Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now (Napalm in the morning, should be LTC)

Lt. Col. Sarah MacKenzie was promoted to this rank in the fifth season of the television series JAG, (USMC should be LtCol, not Lt. Col.)

Lt. Col. Joan Burton of the Lifetime television series Army Wives (should be LTC)

And on and on Lt. Col. Is not a real title.

DSchoen on September 4, 2009 at 4:38 PM

Oh, good. The intellectuals are here.
nico on September 4

Oh, good. The Fruit Fly intellectuals are here.
FIFY

DSchoen on September 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM

Update: Krauthammer, Mara Liasson, and Steve Hayes all think he’ll be gone by Monday.

Which would support what I’ve been saying for a while, which is:

There are only two place to be in Obama’s circle: under the rug or under the bus.

RD on September 4, 2009 at 5:23 PM

There are only two places to be in Obama’s circle: under the rug or under the bus.
RD on September 4, 2009 at 5:23 PM

Fixed.

RD on September 4, 2009 at 5:25 PM

I don’t care what the man has to say. Van is hot!

Chekote on September 4, 2009 at 3:16 AM

Yep. That Van Dude is radioactive. He glows in the dark like a walking biohazard.

Geochelone on September 5, 2009 at 1:53 AM

Unbelievable: Van Jones says 9/11 petition didn’t reflect his views;

Here is a brainf@*t
Will someone plz ask Van Jones what his views are on 9/11

macncheez on September 5, 2009 at 1:55 AM

What is strange is how hotair ed/allah are dead silent on Charels johnson defending this guy van jones

I’ll post this from a comment on ACE of spades blog
Here’s a guy who calls people racists at the drop of a hat for merely having a link on their blogs to another site he doesn’t approve of, or writing anything he doesn’t approve of, or defending themselves against his accusations that insult and undermine their reputations, and he’s defending Truthers because he hates Glenn Beck.

Unbelievable how CJ thinks. He’s gone after Robert Spencer, Diana West, Andrew Bostom, Fjordman, Pamela, and countless others in the most nasty and petty ways with such superiority and holier-than-thou platitudes and here he is being “fair” with Van Jones. What a tool.

kangjie on September 5, 2009 at 12:57 PM

And what is even stranger is that now on LGF blog he has this statement that he is being smeared by right wing blogs and whine blah blah blah and right underneath it he smears Pawlenty over something.
He smears people constantly
This is what happens to hypocrite bullys like CJ, punch back and they run to mommy

kangjie on September 5, 2009 at 1:04 PM

The less any site mentions the nut at Big Purple Baseballs,
the better.

corona on September 5, 2009 at 8:20 PM

Congress must act on these czars immediately.

BuckeyeSam on September 4, 2009 at 5:05 AM

Exactly so.

That’s the key issue here (now that Jones has “resigned” — though I strongly doubt that that means he no longer holds Valerie Jarret in his lap and in doing so, will no longer have Obama’s head to pat when he wants), that Congress must stop this Czar-mania by Barack Obama, IMMEDIATELY REQUIRE ALL OF THEM ALREADY ASSOCIATED WITH THE B.O. ADMIN. to be reviewed VERY CLOSELY by some agreed-upon standards (ethics, experiences relative to public office [big-whig academic degrees don’t count on their own merits], and security credibility [which, I’d like to remind everyone, Barack Obama himself COULD NOT PASS — B.O. could not pass an FBI security clearance process, which likely explains his ongoing dubious “appointments” as to the Czar-seats so far filled).

Congress (without the Leftwing fringe like Waxman, Kerry, Dodd, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Rangel, etc.) has to immediately start a bi-partisan (an actual bi-partisan, that means, sans the Leftwing just identified who have already established themselves as Leftwing-biased) review with procedures established as to who Czars are and how they’re appointed (based upon what criteria).

Leaving these Czar appointments “only” up to a President (and/or to whoever pulls his strings, like Valerie Jarrett and Soros as to the present Presidency) is not a credible, and obviously not a reliable, process.

A President has a Cabinet. The Cabinet exists as part of a Presidential Administration to do certain “hard work” on specific areas of our nation’s government that an individual President could not reasonably manage on a daily basis (Department managements, such that the Cabinet members are to lead/head/represent in the Executive).

Czars, as I understand it, are individuals any President CAN appoint to manage specific areas of our nation’s government that a President needs representation with and in that he/she can’t daily attend to, SIMILAR to a Cabinet appointment but not due Congressional review inorder to land the position — AND, Czars are essentially DISCRETIONARY PERSONNEL any President appoints on little more than his desire and individual determination — Czars report to no one except the President, or so I understand this.

That’s fine and good EXCEPT WHEN THAT PROCESS IS ABUSED by what it appears at present that the B.O. Admin. is doing: abusing the process of Presidential discretionary “hiring” in appointing Czars.

Because Obama’s Czars have been so extensive (while he has not nominated/appointed many other jobs still vacant in the federal government, that will/does require Congressional confirmation, Obama has gone hog-wild with numerous Czar appointments to attempt, so it appears certainly, to avoid public/Congressional review of the personnel involved, and, to literally create a very high number of individuals controlling federal funding and influences that exist in our government — we’re SUPPOSED TO BE a Republic not a Dictatorship — that are there ONLY on the say-so of this one guy, B.Obama, and who bear no responsibility to “the people” (or, the Republic).

We the people require, DEMAND at this point, Congressional action in establishing limitations to the number of Czars allowed per Presidential Administration and some sort of specific criteria that must be fulfilled before any one individual can occupy a Czar position (based upon some sort of security clearances that the average citizen – which the Czars actually are, nothing more, nothing less – must also qualify through inorder to gain any access to directing ANY and ALL national resources (like having the Secret Service requirements affect the Czars or something intelligence works out with Congress as to the qualifications).

Lourdes on September 6, 2009 at 8:33 PM

She made a whopping mistake…she’s done, the Far Right will/has/did plummet her into oblivion and beyond.

AprilOrit on September 4, 2009 at 3:03 PM

Yes, regarding Meg Whitman (who I think you’re referring to based upon earlier post — that YouTube video of Whitman speaking adoringly of Van Jones), she’s not got the enthusiasm for the Governor’s job of CA by anyone among the Right.

But like all CA Gubernatorials, the GOP inevitably supports essentially a Liberal for their nominee because of the Far Left nature of the loudest voters in CA (who are Far Left, the loudest element, not necessarily reflective of the state’s population, just of those who control most media in and from the state as also the many Far Left/Eco-natured [communist] groups there).

What happens is the GOP in CA nominates a Liberal-to-Leftwinger under the GOP ticket because it’s “figured” that “that’s the only way (they) can win an election there”.

I don’t agree with that philosophy, I truly can’t stand that philosophy to be frank, but that has been the going modus operandi of the GOP in CA for a while now.

I don’t know about Whitman’s future but if she’s running against Democrat Dianne Feinstein for the Governor’s job in CA in the next election, well, the choices there are clear to most who can’t stand the Far Left politics of Dianne Feinstein.

Lourdes on September 6, 2009 at 8:44 PM

AprilOrit on September 4, 2009 at 3:03 PM

But there is no excuse, none whatsoever, that justifies Whitman’s enthusiasm for Van Jones. Sounds as if she was infected with something during that cruise she took with him…

Lourdes on September 6, 2009 at 8:46 PM