This leaves the question: how radical then, is the environmental movement? (And yet, notice that's the Post's indirect way of suggesting someone's a left-wing warrior.) On page 3 of Saturday's newspaper, reporters Garance Franke-Ruta (formerly of the lefty magazine The American Prospect) and Anne Kornblut used the L word, legendary:
Jones, a legendary figure in the environmental movement, has worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, as special adviser for green jobs, since March.
It shifted to "towering" after Jones resigned. From the overnight story by Garance and Anne:
Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality since March.
In today's afternoon dispatch by Garance and Scott Wilson, the "towering" remained, even as the radical views and alliances are explained:
Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had issued two public apologies in recent days. One was for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether Bush administration officials "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war," and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.
His previous involvement with the now-defunct Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which had Marxist roots, also emerged as an issue.
It makes you wonder how offensive Van Jones would have to be for his reputation to come back to the environmentalists' precious Earth.
