 The resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones has revealed a lapse in the administration's vetting procedures that, nearly eight months into his tenure, delivered President Obama with an unwelcome distraction as he begins an important week on behalf of his health-care reform initiative.
| It's not a lapse, it's a design feature for the types of people Bambi wants ... |
| Except that apparently the White House did not vet Mr. Jones, who didn't have to fill out the form everyone else did. |
| That's because Val-gal said that Van was cool ... |
Jones's resignation late Saturday came as calls for his ouster increased from Republican leaders, who have been critical of past statements and associations that have also taken the White House by surprise. His departure as a top adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality leaves Obama's push to create "green" jobs, which he has called an essential element of the more stable economy he is trying to build, without a leader.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Sunday explained the resignation on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," saying Jones "decided that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual." Obama does not endorse Jones's past statements and actions, Gibbs said, "but he thanks him for his service."
Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, had issued two public apologies in recent days. One was for signing a petition in 2004 from the group 911Truth.org that questioned whether officials in President George W. Bush's administration "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.
His involvement with the now-defunct Bay Area radical group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which had Marxist roots, also emerged as an issue. And on Saturday, his advocacy on behalf of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of fatally shooting a Philadelphia police officer in 1981, threatened to further deepen the controversy. A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, said Sunday that Jones's past was not studied as intensively as that of other advisers because of his relatively low rank.
| A czar is a low ranking position? Do the other ones know that? |
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