The second tier of influence goes under the bus at midnight

Janet S

Melanie, so glad you are back! I am not surprised by any of this, as I moved to Chicago in the late 70s and early 80s, after graduating from college. While I don't know much about Valerie Jarrett, I remember reading the rantings of her uncle, Vernon Jarrett, in the Chicago Trib. Most columns were of the "whitey done us wrong, you owe us" variety. And this drivel ran twice a week.

Prior to my move, in my ivy-league college, I had a roommate from the south side of Chicago, who was president of the black sorority on campus. It amazed me, coming from a small town in the Midwest with few blacks, how racist in the reverse she was, to the point of calling me a "kike" when I politely asked her not to fry fish in the hallway. Little did I know that she had thoroughly absorbed the mentality propagated by the Jarretts of the world, a mentality I encountered when I moved to Chicago.

This mess seems to me to expose the dirty little secret of the pathologies currently extant in the black community. The unfortunate fact is that the too many in this community supports the loony left. I don't know if they really believe it or feel a need to exhibit group solidarity, but either way, it seems to me to expose a scary fault line. And it is all fanned by the Jeremiah Wrights and all those who preach hate. Call me racist, if you will, but if I were black, I would be very, very worried that Obama and his tactics could backfire and stoke the racism they claim to want to transcend. Of course, that is just another lie by those who pray too loud.

Suki

It is truly staggering. I have been following this on American Thinker in total disbelief yet when one steps back and looks at Obama's past why should one be surprised?

This is the MSM's attitude: "Started your career in the living room of an unrepentant terrorist? Like, we're so over that. Rush Limbaugh on the other hand, is the embodiment of evil."

And I love this quote about the green movement. Week in, week out Richard Littlejohn tells us that the green agenda is simply a way for the state to seize power over the individual, yet he is derided as seeing things that don't exist. Yet here we have it in black and white:

"The green economy will start off as a small subset� of a �complete revolution� away from �gray capitalism� and toward �redistribution of all the wealth...And we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society."

How is that different to what Richard Littlejohn says about the green agenda is really about?

This is what is so shaming about so much of modern journalism. These people hunt in packs and according to fashion and whether things might open out into a documentary with Channel 4 or the BBC.

They know damn well what the truth is and spend the bulk of their wretched lives covering it up and expecting us to applaud their self-aggrandising drivel.

badile

Obama responds to Melanie Phillips:

[Our predecessors] knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Jim Simpson

Right on Trevor! You the man! Thanks, Melanie for giving credit where credit is due.

Marina Mom

Could not have said it better myself. Our American journalists will not criticize this president at all. In the Van Jones case, they criticized the writers who reported the story. Obama is a dangerous radical, and thanks for your truth about our Green Czar. Green is the new Red.

Marina Mom
Marina del Rey, California. USA

Hanoi Paris Hilton

Amazing that the ex-Czar is never identified as the genius behind the "cash-for-clunkers" (CfC) debacle which dropped $ 4 Billion (that four thousand million in the US) in three weeks of borrowed money buried deep in the $800 B "stimulus" bill.

The benefits flowed mostly to the relative handful (about a half million clunker owners) who cleverly cashed in), with the new vehicles then purchased being primarily from Japanese, Korean, and German manufacturers.

Along the way, we got to see those appalling videos all over the Internet of impeccable-looking Volvos and Corvettes having their engines not-so-rapidly euthanized in real time, just when the Obamazoids were trying to peddle extending their tender mercies into the health care sector. Bad idea. Atrocious symbology.

An not least, from a strictly enviro perspective the CfC program was completely irrational as well, as the basic energy costs entailed in replacing the machinery intentionally so destroyed required a half dozen operable vehicles to be "glassed" to equal the construction and lifetime fuel costs of a single replacement vehicle.

This guy was the toast of the Best and Brightest much as Jim Jones, late of Jonestown, Guyana, was the toast of SF Bay Area lefty pols a generation ago. From whence came the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid". Kinda evocative of "under the bus".

Pot Head

Meg Whitman: "I'm A Huge Fan Of Van Jones"

http://is.gd/36bBt

Republican gubernatorial candidate for California

Mike

Welcome back Melanie.
Perhaps the success on Tuesday of the "birthers" in court will also shed more light on the mess.

http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/blog1/
The quote on that site was particularly apposite;

�A nation can survive its� fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor�“He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation�“he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city�“he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. �Cicero, 42 B.C., Roman Statesman, orator, and author.
Wonder when Al-beeb and rest of MSM will report this?

GeoffM

This is a "keeper".

Perhaps a similar investigation into the Labour Party is long overdue.

Marxists like Straw and Miliband(s) need to be exposed - surely there is a "little list" somewhere.

How about publishing it Melanie - I'm sure that if anyone has it it has to be you.

PS Glad you're back. You must spend your holidays working up a foam when you read the papers.

Paul Weston

Well dome Melanie

Even more astonishing is the total, and I mean total, wall of silence from CBS,NBC, CNN and The New York Times over all of this - until the resignation bought about by internet bloggers that is.

As a Conservative, if I found an ex-Nazi had been propmoted to the Whitehouse i would want to know about it.

Liberals apparently do not care when Communists (an ideology which murdered 100 million people) are elevated to positions of immense power.

some Democrats,and all leftist/liberals as personnified by the BBC are genuinely evil.

Original Tony

Well done to Mr Loudon for exposing this commie creep.

Janet S...what does "racist in reverse" mean?

Is racism defined as only ever being white on black and then when the opposite happens it's called 'reverse racism'. What is reverse racism?

Racism is racism pure ansd simple and is not a sin of white people only.

David

Saw a brilliant 5 minite report on this Van character on the BBC primetime detailing exactly what Melanie was talking about.....NOT!!!

Mailman

The most damning thing of all of this is the lack of coverage from the MSM.

Then again, given Barry is their chosen one...we shouldnt be surprised by this all.

Mailman

GaryO

Van Jones blamed the "smear campaign" against him for his resignation.
How is it a smear to quote him in his own words?

If anything, Van Jones smeared himself and the "white" folks of USA. He accuses the white people of "steering poison into the people of color communities� �“ in other words "whites" are poisoning black people of America! Maybe it is this kind of creative idea Valerie Jarrett was tapping into.

Up until Obama's election, I was naïve to think that on the whole, journalists were beyond reproach; their job was to seek the truth and expose corruption. Now I know different. The silence of the MSM on both sides of the Atlantic on Obama's past, his associations and beliefs is deafening - revelations of which would have buried any other "white" candidate a long time ago. The number of free passes that this man got during the campaign and still gets from the media is amazing and then again, perhaps not.

US is in grips of radicalisation by the left. The general public is kept in the dark and those in the media are colluding with those in power to bring about a revolution.

Change is a coming!

Adonis

Yes and today's Metro newspaper in London reports that the POTUS aka Obamacon enjoys a whopping eighty per cent approval rating in Europe, however, it does not mention that this is probably because:

a) The media in Europe do not report his various stumbles and awkward lurches;

b) Europeans are not as close to the anointed One as Americans, where their enhanced locational proximity gives them greater insight into the reasons why Obama may not be such a panacea for the world's evils as the otherwise not unduly gullible Europeans may have been led to believe.

Hysteria

like I said a few days ago - the story is not so much VJ (although that is bad enough) - but more about what it tells us of the mind-set and wolrd view of POTUS - and also the MSM reporting.

Robbins Mitchell

Well,look at the story behind the story....I grew up in Paris ,TN about an hour from Jackson where Jones grew up...about a half hour west of Paris is UTMB...Univ of TN Martin Branch...affectionately known for years in the area as '13th grade' due to the fact that anybody with a HS diploma would be accepted there..nobody who ever got accepted anywhere else went to UTMB...Jones got his BA there even thought there are a number of quite good smaller schools in the area that his educator parents could have sent him to...assuming he could have gotten into one of them....the mere fact that he attended UTMB speaks volumes to those of us familiar with the school...clearly he is not the scathingly brilliant intellect that the so called 'mainstream media' et al would have us believe....he has a good line of ideological balderdash and a certain low animal cunning needed by street hustlers of his ilk....but his whackjob pronouncements of recent years and his underlying Marxist belief system tells me that he's just another graduate of '13th grade' who went off the rails somewhere along the line

Richard Abbot

He is not the Messiah
He's just a very naughty boy

Augustus

This whole business also proves that much of the 'green' agenda is nothing more than a backdoor pass to Marxism. How many more
veteran Communist activists are plotting their liberation agendas under the auspices of the 'brave new world' president?
He wants to shape America's future by strangling the forces of individual freedom. But hopefully not with the majority consent of its people. Now he's just another politician insisting on the truth that nobody believes. Oh ma, switch him off!

Pot Head

"birther" quotes Cicero

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager."

William Burroughs

dissent never likely to get past the mods

"some Democrats,and all leftist/liberals as personnified by the BBC are genuinely evil."
and what exactly are you 'warriors for truth' gonna do about it? lynch a palestinian or a scientist engaging in discussion about global warming?
nah probably best to swallow whole something a bitter reject of the left wing press like Mel has to offer... oh but then again she does still accept work from the BBC?!?

Janet S

Original Tony - You are absolutely right. When I went to college, the general consensus seemed to be that the only racists were whites who hated blacks, not that we knew any of these racists personally. But I learned that the hatred was much worse among blacks, that any black who had white friends was ostracized for "hanging white." At a time when whites were seriously examining their attitudes toward blacks, many blacks were, I believe, heading in the other direction. Witness the racially themed dorms and other attempts at separatism. When I moved to Chicago, I saw the race hustlers and the swamp that promotes these attitudes. Not a pretty sight, but if you understand that, you understand people like Van Jones and the ivy-league educated bigots who constitute Obama's circle.

gareth

How does it take a NZ blogger to bring this to people's attention !! the media are just not honest anymore, I never watch the BBC now.
Thanks Trevor and Melanie.

Jay in DC

You know why there's silence on this? Because it just isn't true.

Van Jones has a radical history but can now be considered a progressive Democrat. Obama is a centrist -- if you knew your history at all, you'd know what a Marxist is and what a socialist is, and Obama ain't them.

As for IPS, the think tank (as did most other think tanks) published people they THOUGHT would be good candidates -- most of whom were not chosen. Van Jones was a coincidence. IPS has very little, if any, influence in the White House.

If you read the environment bill, you'd know that right now the main beneficiaries are polluting companies.

Loudon's specious research and spurious accusations would be laughable, if they weren't so irresponsible. Conservatives are clearly banking more on froth and fury than the issues at hand.

Jerry

President Obama was elected to his position in spite of his leftist background, not because of it. The bottom line is that Americans wanted a Black President.

That every other piece of background information about Mr. Obama was ignored speaks to the problem with human thought. We are not designed to take into account pieces of information that conflict with strong immediate needs. We are not computers that decide on the fly by doing multiple regression equations and assigning weights to various factors that continually appear. Thus, we destroy ourselves.

The only mechanism we have for overcoming our cognitive limitations is the ability to self-correct as it becomes clear that our goals are not being met.

So, we will correct ourselves in the next election! Right! No! This is my biggest fear. I believe that Mr. Obama's need for power is so strong that he will undermine our ability to correct ourselves by stealing the next election. Power is a game for such people who are willing to use real force and real people to manipulate the real world. We see this tendency in teenagers who are sopping-wet with testosterone when they play their computer games. How much more rewarding it would be if they could play soldier and manipulate the real world - with or without the flowing of real blood.

Yes, Mr. Obama remains mired in his early discussions with revolutionaries about the free use of power to bring about "change." There is no modesty in this man, nor is there the belief that truth is an important component of any discussion if it interferes with ideological goals. Here lies the danger for America. We all await the outcome of the game, some with more consciousness and some with less.

cassis

Paul Weston

"As a Conservative, if I found an ex-Nazi had been propmoted to the Whitehouse i would want to know about it."

Me too.

As a conservative anybody in the White House with ties to the National Socialist Party would be a worry.

Or let's give the Nazi's their proper title, in German:

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)

Which as you can probably work out translates as

National Socialist German Worker's Party

Suki

Thanks for the Update, Mel.

On the plus side, Obamacare going under the bus may be a sign of things changing.

American Thinker carried a wonderful story the other week about the publisher of the New York Times being introduced to the crowd at a Frank Valli concert whereupon they booed en masse before all collapsing into laughter at their involuntary en masse response to this goon:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/elites_speak_masses_laugh_fran.html

Again and again people are turning to the blogosphere to go behind the spin of the MSM.

James Delingpole reflects on how Obamacare has been flushed out:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100009180/how-tech-savvy-barack-obama-lost-the-health-care-debate-thanks-to-sinister-right-wing-blogs-like-this-one/

d1carter

The American MSM is now dead, sadly. They will not report anything that will harm our new leader. It is embarrassing.

An American

Melanie,
Thank you for the most indepth information on Van Jones that's come to light so far...it's pretty sad that it takes a Brit instead of an American to expose this underbelly of Obama's administration.

And Jones is just the tip of the iceberg...this is scary as hell.

They way you judge a man is by his friends...Obama put Van Jones in a powerful position with million at his beacon call.

Let's hope that Loudon keeps catching these cockroaches and exposing them to the light of day...do roachs survive in the bright sunlight? Let's hope not.

John

Bush had loads of nasty right-wing idiots in his camp. Same diff.

Frank P

Jerry (4.19pm)

A brilliant observation! Shrewdest analysis on manipulation of the masses I have seen in years. Nota bene folks; Jerry is on the button. And remember that Obama's weak finger is on another button that is designed to deter the enemies of the West. What happens when it is one such whose finger hovers hesitantly over it?

Sam Armstrong

The US is in the grip of radical leftists, as is the UK. Most of our Labour government is composed of ex-Trots.