Van Jones Will Be Back

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/04/the-real-van-jones-scandal-why/ http://spectator.org/archives/2009/09/04/the-real-van-jones-scandal-why/ ”But the question here in the Van Jones case -- as it would have been for me and my Reagan colleagues is very simple. What if I, like the White House guest I had invited, had a police record? Had a seriously questionable set of quite public and quite wacky, well-articulated views captured on video tape? What if I had been a Democrat with a father or older brother in the Ku Klux Klan? What if I had been a John Bircher? What if I had been signing on to documents that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist? What if I had tagged along with Jane Fonda and gone to North Vietnam to mug for the cameras?” “The answer is simple. The only way that I could have gotten a clearance to work for a President Ronald Reagan would be if the President, the First Lady or the Chief of Staff to the President specifically overruled the Secret Service.” “That's it. There was then, and surely is now, no other way.” Obviously this begs the questions: Who in the White House overrode the Secret Service? It is unimaginable that the FBI did not know who this guy was and what he did…why were they overridden? Who in Hussein’s coterie has the hubris to allow an America hating, racist anarchist, an avowed Communist through the gates of the White House let alone into its inner sanctum? Who craves political power with such veracity that they would allow such a person access to the Top Secrets of this country? And the biggest question of them all: How many more people of this ilk are there in the administration? I am sure if asked by the press, which I doubt will happen, president (small p intended) Hussein will shrug his shoulders in disbelief and denial, I would therefore accuse him of: Mendacity!

In the comments section of Mr. Lords article I found an interest evaluation of the current situation which I find sagacious. Well said… Grzmlyk: “Wow. Mr. Lord, are YOU stuck in the dark ages or what? Very cute, your assuming any rules of decorum or tradition or respect for institutions still apply to presidential politics.. You think you are being SCANDALOUS by obliquely intimating that Obama might have – gasp - approved of a Gangsta like Jones being in the White House? Hellooooooo! Obama WANTS people like this around him. It’s WHO OBAMA IS. Jones wasn’t approved in spite of his record; he was approved BECAUSE of it. Wake the hell up, you white-glove conservatives. The rules ALL changed with the coronation of our first hip-hop president. Hip hop culture draws in no small measure from the thuggish conventions that were forged in America’s raw urban slums. It is the romanticizing – and lionization – of the ghetto’s Lord-of-the-Flies mentality Vis a Vis the mundane middle class decorum practiced by the pampered bourgeoisie. The Vanilla Drudges that comprise the “ancient regime” spend most of their time safely insulated in the protective bubble-wrap of dreary suburban values – values that are invariably scorned by rebellious youth, counter-cultural trendiness and, of course, the newly-ennobled Gangsta, pimps and hoes themselves. The hip-hop culture’s hallmark is a harsh, aggressive, rude style of in-your-face interaction, always punctuated by a crass materialism, a worship of instant

gratification, an ostentatiously unapologetic avarice, and a bullying sense of entitlement that have been folded up neatly, given the stamp of “authenticity” and enshrined in our pop culture by our ever-so-wise children, “ageless” hipsters and, of course, “caring” liberals everywhere. And its impact on civility and the decorum that used to dictate dignified human interaction has been like hydrochloric acid on tender skin. Lest I couch it in too much politically correct obfuscation, it’s about blacks “getting paid” by whites. It’s about the tribute white guilt pays to The Law of the Jungle because, of course, it is WE who are to blame for creating this zerosum, primitive, parasitic, brutish mentality. I lived – barely - in NYC from ‘85 to ‘95. I used to go on long walks because I love the history and architecture of the city and, in my brazen youth, I often wandered into neighborhoods where, it was clear, a face like mine wasn’t welcome. I was harassed in polarized Crown Heights. I was a victim of an attempted mugging at the ragged edges of Brooklyn Heights. I was chased out of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that was East New York. I was accosted at the subway in shabby Times Square at two in the morning, where the happenstance of a cop passing by may be the only thing that separated me from the morgue. I had my very first meal, just purchased at Arby’s, taken and eaten in right front of me on my very first day in New York, in the Dodge City that was Port Authority, where I arrived by bus from the bucolic confines of the Brandeis University graduate theater program. I was assaulted and mugged in my doorway near Prospect Park. I have many more anecdotes about slightly less traumatic - but nonetheless instructive - incidents in that primal urban rough-and-tumble of the New York of the Ed Koch/David Dinkins era (itself a hip-hop harbinger of the Obama administration) that made a banal, everyday occurrence out of the reduction of human interaction to life’s most atavistic state: predator vs. prey. I am white. The preps in each case were black. We erstwhile bright-eyed Caucasian suburbanites who had descended on Gotham with dreams in our pockets bore our scrapes with mortality in the mean streets with not a little pride (there’s that reaction to bourgeois values again). Yet, whenever I had a new tale to tell, my harrowing narrative would invariably draw disinterested yawns from my white colleagues and impatient rolled eyes from my black acquaintances. Why? Well, aside from my colleagues’ secret envy at my having another badge of honor to polish and a new story to tell ad nauseum, it was the apotheosis of Ghetto Culture. From my white friends, the most sympathetic responses I got were of the “karmic payback” variety (blacks just doing what our oppression forced them to do). From my black colleagues, it was simply the shoulder shrug of, hey, if a gazelle wanders into a lion’s hunting ground, it ain’t the lion’s fault if the gazelle becomes dinner. And Van Jones personifies this mentality – and our tolerance of it - perfectly, no matter how much environmentalism, social justice, or well-tailored drapery he hides his ghetto ethic in. And the minimal cluck-clucking about what’s really behind his appointment proves that the tribute white guilt pays to thuggish black culture is, as ever, alive and well – as we see with Jeffrey Lord’s painstaking avoidance of – dare I say it, calling a spade a spade –and identifying what’s really going on with the Obama administration: It is the rise of the Hip Hop presidency. Even the ostensibly conservative Fox All-Stars Charles Krauthammer and Stephen Hayes delicately parse their responses to this travesty oh-soignominiously airbrushing out the more thuggish aspects of Jones’s behavior and laughing off a lack of basic civility that you can bet would have had their panties in a bunch during the Bush era. Why, who cares about the death of decorum,

of serious people taking serious approaches to serious problems? (Jones IS black, after all.) Why, their only quibble is that Jones was revealed to be a – gasp “truther!” Hey, Charles and Stephen: That should have been the last straw, not the first. So I wouldn’t count on Van Jones being kicked unceremoniously to the curb. He’s a “playa,” after all, and as hip-hop teaches us, we are to “hate the game, but not the playa.” And even if he is jettisoned from the administration, there are many, many more brutish, unhinged thugs where he came from. Just as occurred with the Reign of Terror, it is the very rejection of tradition, decorum, rule of law, common sense and civility that are the fuel of the Obama revolution. Wake up, conservatives.