Not much to add to Jimmie Bise's Van Jones piece

by Smitty

Someone Get Out the Wetnaps, Van Jones Has Resigned, goes Jimmies post, and he rounds things up nicely.

But for a nice chaser, there is Carl Pope at the Huffer: We All Blew It. Now, I don't want to spend time wondering about the relation of the verb and direct object in the title have to do with the end of the last Iowahawk outing.
Pope:

...on Saturday night, Van resigned, and this morning I was sick at heart. Collectively we -- the environmental community, progressives, and the Obama administration -- blew this, and we let our cause, our president, and Van Jones down.

This was a lynch mob and, when it started forming a month ago, we didn't take it seriously enough. When I saw the first Glenn Beck piece on Van Jones and the Apollo Alliance as the new vast left-wing conspiracy, I could not take it seriously. Silence enabled Fox to keep pushing. The statements for which Jones apologized -- the reference to the right as "assholes" and saying that Bush was talking "like a crack-head" were such ordinary political discourse -- think Rahm Emmanuel, think Dick Cheney saying "fuck yourself" to Senator Leahy, think Tom Friedman dubbing Bush "the addict-in-chief" -- that I didn't understand why an apology was necessary; I assumed it would blow over.

I guess it would be an interesting experiment. Maybe Dr. Helen could officiate. Sit a guy like Pope down in a room, and have him go over the facts, and determine just what minimum amount of reality is needed to achieve actual understanding.

The rest of Pope's piece is about the spirited defense of Jones he'd intended to post, before Van ejected, "revved up like a deuce into the roller in the night" as it were. Here is the title:

Breaking News: "George W. Bush Says Americans Are Crack-Heads".

I don't know, maybe it seems less an exercise in Olympic straw-grasping in context. Read his full post, and see if you don't think the premise somewhere between completely unhinged and off-meds-surreal. I, for one, stand awed.