I'll stipulate that the truther petition is way out there. That said, how many people here haven't thought and said that Republicans are a**holes? I wish more people were expressing that kind of opinion. Maybe Jones should not have been brought into the WH. I don't know. Once he was there, though, the president should have backed him up and responded to Beck with the disdain Glenn Beck so richly deserves.

Also we'd better NEVER participate in any lawful activity like signing a well-written petition that calls for a thorough independent investigation into the worst crime in recent memory.  (Whether you are a "truther" or not, do you all feel completely satisfied with the official investigation and explanation of 9/11?  Yahhh....).

Because who knows, you might get picked for some public office, and then the Republicans might take some offense at something you said or did, and use it as an excuse to run you out of town so you can't further an agenda that's not Republican-friendly.

So G*d knows, we can't offend the Republicans, now can we?  They will stop us cold, even though we have a majority.

Can't stand Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh or Oreilly. Of course, following this cycle I also can't stand the for lack of a better term "radical left" like Olbermann or Maddow either.

I sympathize with his plight but his judgment was poor in signing up with people who would undermine his credibility.

All Republicans are assholes might sound ok to some folks. But that's a sign of how deep into the toilet our own standards have gone.

All calls for civility have been ignored. Ridicule and personal attacks (long the tools of the right) have displaced rock-solid argument. Jones practiced the former instead of the latter.

People are sick of the name-calling (tea-b**gers).

If Dems don't start finding a civil elevator speech to close the health-care deal it won't anybody else's fault. Attraction does work.

Folks here may find Jones an attractive figure. Most others don't. Including some in the WH.

I don't know the truth of that statement, or how he fleshes that out, but I can understand a person being "radicalized" by the Rodney King beating, but I can't understand anyone (and a law student esp.) being radicalized by the LA Riot aftermath.

That was pure stupidity and it wreaked havoc on all corners and all kinds of people in Los Angeles, from Reginal Denny, to the Koreans, to the Black neighborhoods.

I worked in downtown LA at the time for the LAFD and saw them getting threatened and shot at for trying to put out fires.  I worked in downtown LA and saw the California National Guard, a good percentage of whom were minority, come in and try to put a stop to the riots, the riots were stupid, ignorant, expressions of hatred.

There is nothing particularly extraordinary about the statement signed by Jones, which begins by citing a Zogby International poll finding that about half of New York City residents, and 41 percent of residents in New York state, believe that sections of the US government had foreknowledge of the attacks and "consciously failed" to act. Sixty-six percent supported a new investigation into these questions. Other polls have found that more than a third of the population and more than 40 percent of self-described Democrats throughout the country reject the official explanation of September 11.

Calling into question the foundation of the "war on terror," however, is completely proscribed within the political establishment and mass media. Indeed, the broad-based skepticism over 9/11, the event that became the central rationale for the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the massive attack on democratic rights in the US, is remarkable given the complete silence on such matters within "official" circles.

Jones's association with such conceptions is particularly problematic for the Obama administration as it carries out a massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the pretext that this is necessary to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

This is by any stretch a very shady organization.  None of the Bushies resigned because of their judgment being called into question by being members, not just signing some petition.

I object to this entire organization and I objected that my government was riddled with members of it.  I bet I was far from being alone on this issue.

I also would bet money that the reason the Bush administration received absolutely no fallout was NOT because no one objected.  I bet that any objections were smoothed over or ignored.  To check my suspicion, I ran a Newsbank search for "New American Century," "PNAC," "Project for a New American Century," or "Project for the New American Century" in the lead/first paragraph.  In the entire lexicon of major newspapers through the years, I got exactly 42 hits.  Of the 42 hits, only one was not a letter or opinion piece (NYT, 12/3/2001, quoting from a letter sent to Clinton in 1998 by the New American Century advising regime change in Iraq).

Now if I, who am relatively uninformed, read about this organization and learned something about it, clearly there were plenty of voices making noise.  But the majority of the American public would have read --- essentially nothing.

How do we know these folks are wingnuts, exactly?

He signed a 9/11 truth petition.  That is political poison.  Period.

One can choose to ignore this simple fact and pretend that he was a doctor or a police officer but the facts are he took political office and did so knowing that he was a political liablility.

He was stupid, Obama's team was stupid for not vetting him and all this make belive that he was some sort of victim is amazing.

If Bush had hired a Klansman to be head of the EPA would the left had sat on their hands?

Of course not and nor should they.

As I'm seeing it in the comments and various stories, Van Jones somehow attracted the wrong attention from Glenn Beck.  Digging deeper, Beck discovered that Jones had signed onto a 9/11 truth petition and put that to his audience's attention, among other things such as his Marxist leanings in the 1990s.  Jones promptly resigned, knowing he was a liability and/or that the WH didn't want to defend him.  Is that about right?

BTD is absolutely correct.  Forget what people "ought" to do; in politics one has to deal with how people actually think.

Obama's problems are multiplying because he mistook his election as a coronation.  The MSM's sycophantic "tingle up the leg" hagiography is partly to blame.  Here's what he's up against (and remember, "fair" has nothing to do with it):

1. When he pushed the stimulus, he said it would cap unemployment at 8% or under.  It is now 9.7% on its way to double digits, and would be worse if they counted people who have been unemployed so long they're considered to be no longer looking for work.  Result:  Loss of credibility.

2.  The Skip Gates, cops acting "stupidly" affair.  The beer get-together was a good idea, and I think Dr. Gates and Officer Crowley actually got to know one another.  But the picture of Obama walking ahead, with Crowley helping Dr. Gates down the stairs, was seen by a LOT of independents.  Result:  Loss of trust, damage to claim of being "post-racial".

3.  Health care:  When illegal immigrants and those with enough money to pay for their own care are removed from the equation, only about 5-9 million people are without health care.  That is insignificant in a population of over 300 million.  Despite the Democrats' agitation over the subject, people do not believe there is any health care crisis.  They are happy with what they have, and favor tort reform, portable policies and policies sold across state lines if any changes are to be made.  The public option is perceived as socialism, and Americans want no truck with it.  People might go for a government program to cover those 5-9 million - maybe just extend Medicare to cover them.  But the wholesale restructuring is DOA.  Result:  Damage to Obama's campaign stance as a "moderate", reinforcement of the perception he's a leftist / socialist.  (Having a self-proclaimed marxist as his Green Jobs Czar doesn't hone those "moderate" credentials).