Van Go ... Van Gone

Letter to the Editor, Virginian Pilot, September 7, 2009

In your September 7, 2009, article “Critics led Obama adviser to resign, he says,” you selectively quote facts to infer that the principal reasons “conservatives” called for Van Jones’ resignation as the “Green Jobs Czar” was his inadvertent signature on a “9/11 Truther” petition and his public statement that Republicans are “A—holes.” Nothing could be further from the “truth.” Being called names does not offend this conservative: I have come to expect it from the left. What offends me about Jones are facts that you do not report in your paper: he is a self avowed Communist, who was selected and vetted solely by the Obama administration and not the congress, operates outside the purview of congressional oversight, and controls $30B in public funding.

In 1992, Jones was quoted as saying, “In jail I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ’This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people, I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary … I was a rowdy nationalist, on April 28 and then the verdicts came down on April 29. By August, I was a communist.” In 2005 he said, “ I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of the radical ends.” His four year old son is named after a militant Marxist guerilla. This is not a person I, or any American, should want advising the President, unanswerable to Congress, and controlling a $30B budget.

President Obama said during his campaign that if one wanted to know how he would govern to examine those to whom he would look for advice. Well, I did, and the picture is not pretty. Van Jones is one of many in his cadre of 37+ “Czars” who have questionable ties to socialist, Marxist, Communist ideology and organizations.