The "resignation" shortly after midnight on Sunday morning of President Obama's "green jobs czar" Van Jones has generally been seen as a convenient holiday weekend move.
By Friday, after White House Secretary Robert Gibbs would only say that he still was a part of the administration, it was obvious that Jones's resignation was only a matter of time. The 9/11 truther and other evidence accumulated by Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, WorldNetDaily, and others was simply overwhelming.
But it seems to me that it would have been more convenient had the White House waited until early Sunday afternoon to announce Jones's resignation. Given the establishment media's near blackout of his past statements and actions, it's likely that the Sunday morning network talk shows would have avoided Jones completely, or would have given the topic very short shrift. A Sunday afternoon resignation would have been much more invisible -- except for something that came out on Saturday evening.
I believe that Jones's resignation may have been moved up by 12 hours or so. That's because on Saturday evening, Scott Johnson at Powerline presented proof that roughly 40 hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, avowed Communist Jones publicly declared that the U.S. deserved what happened. I'm not kidding.
Jones's statements are the functional equivalents of Jeremiah Wright's outrageous "America's chickens coming home to roost" rant at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (y'know, the church Obama attended for almost two decades while managing to hear nothing inflammatory from Pastor "G__ D___ America"). They need to be more widely known.
Here they are, as reported by a far left web site early in the morning on Wednesday, September 13, 2001, covering an event in Oakland held on the evening of September 12:
Let's repeat: "The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City."
++++++++++++++++++
UPDATE: At the end of the video posted here at BizzyBlog (HT to NB commenter Merkava below), Jones says, “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.” This is either a different statement made the same evening, or IndyBay quoted the statement above incorrectly.
++++++++++++++++++
Keep in mind that Jones (in the original IndyBay quote) had to be referring to either the first Gulf War or no-fly-zone incidents, as the war to remove Saddam Hussein did not begin until 2003.
Charleston Daily Mail blogger Don Surber had this reaction to Powerline's post a short time later: "(This is) the smoking gun that will either bring down Van Jones or Barack Obama. It is President Obama’s choice." That choice was obvious.
From a White House media strategy standpoint, Jones's dead-of-night resignation unfortunately ensured that he would be a topic of conversation Sunday morning, but it minimized the chance of Powerline's bombshell becoming part of the discussion. Sure, David Axelrod had to go through the discomfort of laughably claiming that "this was Van Jones' own decision." That's a mere occupational annoyance. Given the chattering class's reluctance all along to tell viewers the full truth about Jones, his resignation gave them an opening to change the topic from "What did he say and do?" to "Whose fault is it?" (meanie bloggers, talkers, and Republicans, not necessarily in that order) and "How will this hurt the administration?" (of course, in their view and with their weeks of help, not much). No additional information about Jones himself was necessary to fuel that discussion.
The White House did the best it could with a bad situation suddenly made much worse by Powerline, and the media met the White House's see-no-new-evil wishes/expectations. Mission accomplished: Few people know that Jones believed, and still presumably does (in the context of everything else, why shouldn't we?), that America deserved the 9/11 attacks. You can make book that the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the rest of the establishment press will ignore what you've seen here.
One thing we don't know is how aware of Jones's "deserver" views Obama's close left-hand adviser Valerie Jarrett was when she made this statement in mid-August:
So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.
If we're to believe Jarrett's boast, the answer is "very."
Note: I did not include a 9/11 picture of the Pentagon only because of space limitations, and I intend no slight to the memory of that attack or of those who lost loved ones in it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
