Below The Beltway

It happened in the dead of the night, but Van Jones is out at the White House:

White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned late Saturday after weeks of pressure from the right over his past activism.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition 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.

Republicans in Congress were, predictably, preparing to call for investigations, but even some Democrats had joined in:

Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones’s “fitness” for the position, writing in an open letter, “Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?”

The reaction on the right side of the blogosphere is predictably jubilant as you can see from perusing The Other McCain, Gateway Pundit,  The Strata-Sphere, GayPatriot, Jim Treacher’s Blog …, Riehl World View, RedState, HotAirPundit and Wake up America, but it’s the reaction on the left that I found interesting.

One Daily Kos blogger called the Jones matter a “high tech lynching”:

If you think that this happened all by accident, stop reading now: you’re too naive and inexperienced in the Real World to be reading this, and does your mother know you’re using her computer?

This kind of stuff doesn’t happen by accident. Even huge stories don’t get this kind of MEE TOO! MEE TOO! kind of Beatlemania. No: the Beck to Bloggers to willing “Mainstream” media is clear, and we can trace the circuitry of a massive Right Wing conspiracy (which we knew about) to control all media debate through whatever thuggish means.

We just never realized how HUGE it was.

These are the bastards trying to choke the breath out of American debate. These are the perverts gang-raping the Goddess of Liberty. These are the traitors who claim that anyone who doesn’t think like they do isn’t a True American.

As if they’d know.

This is a high tech lynch mob.

Aimed at a Black man.

Who dared to get uppity.

Yea, that’s right it’s all about race. And those of us who oppose Obama are all racists.

You know, for a time, I honestly thought that electing the first Black President would finally bring an end to the Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson race hustling industry. I was wrong, it’s still alive and well.

Digby at Hullabaloo has this to say:

I certainly hope this makes it quite clear that consistency is not something Obama should count upon from his enemies. Indeed, I fully expect that the next time the Republicans take office they will launch several investigations of the previous Democratic administration (assuming they haven’t already taken over congress, in which case they will begin while he’s still in office.) They do not observe the self-imposed rules the Democrats put upon themselves. That should be obvious by now.

Now that’s just plain laughable. Democrats have engaged in exactly these types of games going all the way back to the Reagan Administration. I frankly don’t care about Van Jones one way or the other — although I will say that I really don’t think there’s a place in any Administration, or in respectable society, for someone who thinks that the United States Government was involved in 9/11 or who wants such a possibility “investigated” — but to sit there and claim the moral high ground when your side is just as guilty of the tactics you complain of is just plain absurd.