Van Meet Bus

I’m starting a pool, I think. When do you suppose that Barack Obama will throw Czar Van the First under the bus? A self-proclaimed communist and a 9/11 “truther” to boot, Van Jones is now a severe liability for the one.

A top environmental official of the Obama administration issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into “evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur.”

Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is Number 46 of the petitioners from the so-called “Truther” movement which suggests that people in the administration of President George W. Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

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. A source said Jones did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.

As to the communist admission, this is from an interview quoted in the above linked article:

In 2005 Jones told the East Bay Express that the acquittal of Rodney King’s assailants in 1992 in that infamous police brutality case changed him significantly. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

Jones and other young activists in 1994 formed a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, rooted in Marxism and Leninsm. Two years later, Jones launched the Ella Baker Center, an Oakland, Calif., based “strategy and action center” which states that it tries to “promote positive alternatives to violence and incarceration.”

Almost too funny is this related item that is currently up on Memeorandum from Joe Klein:

I was at a Blanche Lincoln town hall meeting in Russellville, Arkansas, yesterday–and the number of people who believe that the President has larded the government with communists (!) was astonishing.

Nope, no communists here. Nothing to see, move along. Wonderful timing, Joe. Brilliant(!) (See, I can use exclamation points to to convey sarcastic disdain, too!)

We do not need troofer-trash marxists in the government. This guy has to go.

Back to the pool, then. I’m guessing Van meets bus by the end of the day today. Its Friday before a holiday weekend, the perfect time for one of Obama’s signature “bury it over the weekend” moves. Feel free to add your guess in the comments section.