Van Jones, Obama's highly regarded--amongst greenies, anyway--green jobs czar with a colorful past is under serious fire, particularly from Glenn Beck and Fox News. Today's big bomb shell on Van Jones is that he signed a 9/11 truther statement:
Fox News: President Obama's "green jobs" adviser could become a mounting liability for the Obama administration, as the latest revelation about Van Jones shows his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks could have been an inside job.
Jones joined the "9/11 truther" movement by signing a statement in 2004 calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggests "people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
Glenn Beck has been attacking Van Jones because he was a founder of Color of Change, which has been trying to get advertisers to jump off his show since he called Obama a racist. At least that's the theory on the interwebs.
Van Jones was a communist and an activist in the nineties, but mellowed out this decade, and wrote the bestseller, The Green Collar Economy. In 2008 Time called him an Environmental Hero, and Fast Company said he was one of the 12 Most Creative Minds of 2008.
Van Jones is a relatively minor figure in the White House. He's the green collar jobs czar, after all, so it'll be interesting to see what the White House does here. It's unlikely they want to back down if Fox News whips up a controversy, but on the other hand, having a 9/11 Truther on the payroll isn't exactly ideal.
Maybe it all blows over during the Labor Day weekend?