Obama’s Green Jobs Adviser Gives In to the Smears

It looks as if the insanely organized smear campaign against Van Jones has finally worked. Jones, President Obama’s special adviser for green jobs, resigned Saturday after being viciously attacked for his past civil rights activism and for signing a petition that questioned U.S. involvement in 9/11. — J.C.

The Washington Post:

“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 Sunday. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: “I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to ‘stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. 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.

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