Republican House aides attempt to shut down Democracy in 2000.

Van Jones: Let’s Stop Trying To Please Republicans

The GOP were smart when they made the decision to swiftboat Van Jones out of the Obama administration in 2009, because Van Jones is a tremendously powerful force for good.

Individuals like Van Jones and Howard Dean are trouble for the GOP because they care more about the country than they do about political expediency or personal interest, which makes them unpredictable and therefore hard to control and manipulate.   So they have to be killed – in the political sense – through the  creation of  some type of media smear that not only stops the threatening person in their current tracks, but makes it so they will never have any political viability ever again.

I remember when the Van Jones smear happened in 2009.  It felt exactly the same as when they swift-boated John Kerry in 2004 and exactly the same as when paid GOP operatives pounded on the doors stopping the Florida recount in 2000.  It felt as though you were under assault.  You felt like a deer in headlights.  They were so hell-bent it seemed as if nothing could stop them, that resistance was futile. And in those instances, they were not stopped.  Democratic activists wanted John Kerry and Al Gore to have put up a better fight.   It seems that Van Jones has since realized that he probably should have too.

If you’re not familiar with Van Jones, here’s a bit of background from Wiki:

Environmental advocate, civil rights activist, and attorney. He is a co-founder of four non-profit organizations including Rebuild the Dream, Center for Human Rights, a California non-governmental organization (NGO) working for alternatives to violence, Color of Change, an advocacy group for African Americans, Green for All, a national NGO dedicated to “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty, and Rebuild the Dream, a national advocacy organization working towards a fairer economy.  He is author of The Green Collar Economy which won the Nautilus Book Award and reached number 12 on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2008, Time magazine named Jones one of its “Heroes of the Environment.

In March 2009 Jones was appointed by President Barack Obama to the newly created position of Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he worked with various “agencies and departments to advance the administration’s climate and energy initiatives, with a special focus on improving vulnerable communities.”  

In 2009 the Republicans duped the gullible media by way of Glenn Beck into reporting a trumped up controversy that Van Jones was actually a  peasant sympathizer (in GOP eyes this is a bad thing), and therefore a Marxist.  Predictably, the GOP were able to make enough noise and clamor in the moral-less media to cause the selfless Van Jones to resign from his position. Does this sound familiar?  Yes, we’ve seen this low budget summer horror movie before.  Purely for political gain with no redeeming social value, the blockbuster nontroversy  is a common GOP tactic that works so effortlessly and perfectly every time that you wonder why they don’t use it more often.  It makes sense that they are bringing  it out now in an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act once and for all.  Are we the people going to let it work this time?

Please watch and share this powerful and deeply astute three-and-a-half minute video because Jones’ analysis of the pathology of the GOP, authentically arrived at through personal experience of their vile tactics, is both brilliant and 100% correct.  In it he says that the GOP must be dealt with  – not by appeasement because they are unappeasable, but by standing up strong for progressive values and not backing down. The sooner we all figure this out and help our Democratic leaders figure it out, the better our chances for political and actual survival will be.