I can neither confirm nor deny . . .

. . . being The Prowler, whose identity has long remained a closely guarded secret of The American Spectator. Not even Sidney Blumenthal nor federal grand juries have been able to discover the identity of this Argus-eyed investigator of things sinister, hidden and usually Democratic.

The fact that The Prowler has been sleuthing around with sources unnamed for longer than I've been writing for the Spectator might be seized upon as a clue. And the fact that The Prowler is able to get inside dirt from the White House counsel's office -- the inside story of Valerie Jarrett's involvement in the Van Jones debacle, no less -- might also have evidentiary value.

Yet such are the Spectator's concerns for the security of The Prowler that anyone who wishes to be associated with this prestigious publication must undergo a blood-oath ritual, swearing in a graveyard at midnight never to aid the persistent attempts by our nation's enemies to identify The Prowler. Therefore, if anyone wishes to suspect me of being that mysterious phantom, I am forbidden even to deny it.

However, if you wish to subscribe to The American Spectator, you may one day have an opportunity to meet The Prowler, who always attends the magazine's annual gala dinner -- this year's lavish soiree will be Nov. 19 at the Capitol Hilton -- although he is recognized only by those who have sworn the blood oath. The Prowler might be that elegant fellow drinking extra-dry martinis at the gala reception, or entertaining his dinner companions with subtly ribald jests. Although the uninitiated guests won't recognize The Prowler, they'll nonetheless be able to tell their friends they were at the same gala with him.

By the way, the September issue of The American Spectator -- available for $6.95 wherever fine publications are sold -- features my 3,000-word in-depth article about the IG-Gate scandal, entitled "War On Watchdogs," beginning on Page 46.

Subscribe to The American Spectator now. The Prowler awaits you . . .

Just in case you ever doubtedthat Keith Olbermann is nuts

He's now asking the Daily Kos kooks to help him destroy Glenn Beck and Fox News:

Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes. . . . Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enablers, Ailes . . .

(Hat tips to Ace of Spades and Howard Portnoy in the Green Room.) Several ironies here:

• Van Jones was a relative minor administration official. It's not like he was Secretary of the Treasury. And yet his resignation -- he wasn't fired, he resigned -- is the casus belli for total war on Beck.
• It's not like Jones was sent to federal prison. (As opposed to Scooter Libby, who took the fall in the Left's PlameGate witch-hunt.) Jones will surely go on to some prestigious big-money job, plus the usual book deal, speaking engagements, etc. His "victimhood" is non-existent.
• Having Olbermann as an enemy is just another feather in Beck's cap.

So, either Olbermann is completely nuts or he's just cynical exploiting the insane rage of the Nutroots. Either way, nothing Olby does can harm Beck, and all this stunt will do is to demonstrate Olby's impotence.

Memeorandum goes nuts for this. The Jones-as-victim meme is also pushed by Alan Colmes, Jane Hamsher, Carl Pope of HuffPo and some left-wing blogger whom I never heard of until Sunday. And the same idea -- Jones victimized by vicious Republicans -- was a favorite theme of network news coverage of Jones' resignation.

The astounding disproportion between the facts -- who Van Jones is and what got him in trouble -- and the Left's perception tells you a lot about what's gone wrong in Hopeville. For all the recent uproar about Joseph Farah and "Birthers," it is the Democratic Party which suffers most from the influence of its extremist supporters.

Jane Hamsher, Alan Colmes, and Keith Olbermann apparently live inside an echo chamber where a man who was a leader of a Marxist outfit like STORM, and who subsequently signed a 9/11 Truther petition, is not legitimately controversial. (The next time Colmes goes on Fox, somebody needs to ask him, "Hey, Alan, do you think Marxism is a bad thing?")

That someone like Jones could be appointed as a White House policy "czar," and that Olbermann can't see where some people might have a problem with that, tends to disprove the worry-wart concerns of certain centrist Republicans that the GOP is the more "extreme" of the two major parties. Does anyone seriously expect an avowed "Birther" to get a White House job in the next Republican administration?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Given the state of the economy, it's very important that you hit the tip jar before you're bankrupted by the next mortgage meltdown. Now, who's in the mood for some Labor Day gloom-and-doom?

New word: naïvel

Naïvel (adj.):

Comination of naïve + evil. This adjective covers the progression of audience opinion of a speaker from the first state to the second. It is frequently useful in the context of a public figure attempting to sell a steaming pile of nonsense as a reasonable statement. The audience wants to take the speaker at face value, because that is what reasonable people do.

The first thought in the mind of the audience is: "Wow, the guy forced to answer for this event must have been really naïve to buy off on that chain of reasoning in the first place."

That thought fades out with a disquieting aftertaste. Given the probabilistic nature of confidence in anything said by a public figure, the audience moves to a state where:

1. The intelligence required to hold the public office should preclude such naïvete,
2. Therefore, the likelihood of there being more facts to the story is quite high, and the motive for the steaming loaf of nonsense, instead of candor, might be reasonably attributable to sheer evil.

Example:
White House press briefing.
Robert Gibbs: Major?
Fox News Correspondent Major Major Major Major: Given the presumably thorough screening applied to Executive Office positions, how is it possible that Van Jones was hired, considering the amount of blatantly anti-American output the gentleman produced this decade?
Gibbs: Well, we were unaware of any of that.
Major^4: Dude, like, tha' is soo the naïvel, and stuff.


Update:
Linked at Reaganite Republican Resistance.

---

This post is really a shameless attempt to be cool like Morgan Freeberg.

Pelosi endorsing Van Jones

by Smitty (h/t Don Surber)

No guess as to when the Wicked Witch of the West said this, but, as a safety measure, have your barf bag in hot standby for this one:

Maybe San Fran Nan could be John Edwards' next squeeze for Sunsetter Retractable Awnings:

WHO HIRED VAN JONES?

Now that he's resigned -- thanks for the linky-love, Tim Blair -- we turn to Jennifer Rubin:

"The question remains: how did he get hired?"

Expect Michelle Malkin to follow up on this, but I think she already has the answer from Valerie Jarrett:

Valerie Jarrett took full credit at the nuttroots dKos blogger conference . . . for recruiting him and closely following his career:
"You guys know Van Jones? . . . Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House."

Such "creative ideas" and "all that energy"! A Yale Law grad and yet, somehow, a victim of raaaaacism!

Pejman Yousefzadeh throws some show-tune lyrics at Jones. (NTTAWWT.) The Underground Conservative and Right View from the Left Coast give up the linky-love. (NTTAWWT, either.)

UPDATE: As predicted, Michelle Malkin conducts a seminar on how the MSM has ignored and distorted the story about Van Jones.

VAN JONES RESIGNS!

AP NEWS ALERT:

Obama aide Van Jones resigns as environmental adviser amid controversy over past statements.

Remember: 5 A's in "raaaaaacism."

UPDATE: We remind you that John Hinderaker had expected the rap-music angle to be the last straw.

UPDATE II: More AP news via Chicago Tribune: "The White House issued a statement early Sunday saying Jones had quit the administration."

UPDATE III: by Smitty
Since you can't find Don Meredith doing "Turn Out the Lights" on YouTube, how about an obscure dude from Seattle working out on Roger Miller?

UPDATE IV: (RSM) Heavy action on Twitter:

• John Hawkins: "I'll enjoy the sweet salty tears of the Left and their cries of 'Racism! Wingnuts! Rarrrr!' over Van Jones leaving"
• LadyPatriot: "The wheels on Obama's bus go thumpety-thump. Van Jones, you can't trust a guy who throws his grandma & 20yr pastor under the bus!"

Fire Andrea Mitchell is also blogging the resignation.

UPDATE V: WH statement at Washington Post:

"I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today," Jones said in a resignation letter released by the CEQ late Saturday.
"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide," he said.
"I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight,'" he continued. "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.
"It has been a great honor to serve my country and my President in this capacity. I thank everyone who has offered support and encouragement. I am proud to have been able to make a contribution to the clean energy future. I will continue to do so, in the months and years ahead."

UPDATE VI: David Horowitz at NewsReal says Valerie Jarrett should go, too:

The Obama Administration -- the Soros network and the Apollo Alliance -- are revealed to their rotten core here. This was their protege and only an idiot . . . would not be able to see what’s going on here.

UPDATE VII: Wlady at the The American Spectator cites the Wall Street Journal -- when I had it 20 minutes earlier! A blogger gets no respect, no respect at all, I tell ya . . .

Now a Memeorandum thread. Our claim to exclusivity? Thanks to Smitty, we're the only blog to react to this news with video of some dude strumming a ukelele and singing "King of the Road."

UPDATE VIII: You gotta love the L.A. Times:

Van Jones, the onetime Marxist whose controversial statements about Republicans and 9/11 have made him a distracting lightning rod as Barack Obama's environmental czar in recent days, resigned tonight.

That "onetime Marxist" is classic. As if, sometime in the interval, Jones had an epiphany on the Road to Damascus: "Hayek! Mises! Friedman! We must deregulate! Cut taxes!"

Fox News now has a story, and a Red State blogger observes:

Interesting time to be turning in one's resignation - midnight Saturday night, on a holiday weekend. I guess this gives the MSM a chance to not report it again.

Of course, while the MSM ignored the "controversy," they'll be all over the resignation as proof of the viciousness of right-wingers.

UPDATE IX: Predictable reaction at DailyKos:

Van Jones: A "High-Tech Lynching"

Yeah, I'm sure George Allen is heartbroken about this. Understatement of the decade from Ed Driscoll:

[S]omething tells me that Glenn Beck is going to have reasonably good ratings on Monday.

Gee, ya think? Ed quotes Andy Levy's Twitter:

"Won't it be weird when people who don't get their news from the internet or FNC have no idea who the guy who resigned is?"

Read the whole thing -- a really solid aggregation by Mr. Driscoll. Well, I've done enough for one Sunday morning. Alabama beat Virginia Tech, Van Jones resigned, and all is right with the world.

There are five A's in 'raaaaacism'

The Van Jones controversy is addressed with blunt brutality by Angry Bear:

[T]here’s a subsection of the left who have made their bones and fortunes using interest group grievances and get caught flat-footed when they’re suddenly thrust into a position where results actually matter. Actually strike that. He’s the “green jobs czar.” His results don’t matter but they will be measured which is roughly the same level of kryptonite. What’s happening to Jones is probably what would happen if Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton were forced to get a real job.

Ouch. Welcome to the Obama Nation, where all criticism is subject to the accusation of raaaaacism. If Obama throws Jones under the bus, the Leader's minions will depict it as a sop to right-wing hatemongers, and Jones will walk away with a platinum Victimhood Card, immediately redeemable for a six-figure book contract.

Hesitant myself to call attention to the "interest group" aspect of the Van Jones situation, journalistic curiosity gets the better of me. How many UT-Martin graduates have been admitted to Ivy League law schools in the past 20 years?

Remember: Five A's in raaaaacism . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Just because the Professor went to Yale Law, doesn't mean his spelling never needs correction. Nevertheless, Insty remains our up-to-the-minute source, informing us that the esteemed T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII has at last weighed in.

UPDATE II: "Prescient." Aw, shucks. T'weren't nothin' . . .

UPDATE III: Linked by Dyspepsia Generation and, coincidentally, Pundette just discovered she's a raaaaacist.

Senator Warner uses the word 'Constitution'

by Smitty

CNSNEWS has Senator Mark Warner from his ObamaCare town hall.

But one thing, listen, there is,
there is no place in the Constitution that specifically says health care.
There’s no place in the Constitution that specifically says education.
There is no place in the competition, in the Constitution,
there is no place in the Constitution,
there is no place in the Constitution,
there is no place in the Constitution,
there is no place in the Constitution
that talks about you ought to have the right to get a telephone, but we have made those choices as a country over the years.

What my Senator says is certainly true, though one could draw a sharp distinction between the telephone, and health care, which is older than Washington's false teeth:

...the most interesting part of the story about George's teeth is the mechanism of their fabrication. The upper and lower gold plates were connected by springs which pushed the upper and lower plates against the upper and lower ridges of his mouth to hold them in place. Washington actually had to actively close his jaws together to make his teeth bite together. If he relaxed, his mouth would pop open. There is speculation that this is the reason that the Father of Our Country always looks so stern in his portraits. Take a look at a dollar bill. George isn't upset - he's just trying to keep his teeth in!!!

Or, possibly, he's peering into the future at what a mess would come when a free people would allow a permanent political class (read: aristocracy) come along and steal the liberty he literally, not politically, fought so hard to obtain.

How many orbits would 'Astronaut' Jones make in a George Washington administration sworn in today? Might not even make it off the launch pad, much less to the pad, would be my estimate.

Update:
Pat in Shreveport does some PuffHo work so you don't have to, in addition to rounding up other "Astronaut" Jones coverage.
She does, sadly, miss the real reason VJ has to go: an IRS review revealed he'd paid his taxes.

Update II:
Oh, and Thomas Friedman was a Van Fan. Nitwit.

Van Jones thrown under Obama's bus?

Twittered by Ed Morrissey comes this report from Slate's Mickey Kaus:

[T]oday is the day the MSM (not just Tapper) officially turns on Van Jones, the White House "green jobs" adviser who signed a 2004 Truther petition. 'Gone by midnight' is the prediction. . . . Soon he'll meet with his death panel and be under the bus! . . . Obama presumably doesn't want the controversy to bleed into post-Labor Day Speech Week.

If true, Michelle Malkin and especially Glenn Beck can hang this scalp on their belts. Accusations of raaaaacism in 3, 2, 1 . . .

UPDATE: Pat Austin notes that Van Jones was a HuffPo contributor, brooding over "dreams . . . eaten away by the AIDS virus, laid off by down-sizers, locked out by smiling bigots, shot up by gang-bangers and buried in a corporate-run prison yard."

Think about this. Van Jones is a Yale Law School graduate (just like Glenn Reynolds) who according to a 2005 interview, had already landed a D.C. job after graduation but instead decided to move to the San Francisco area to become involved in a radical protest movement. He subsequently received a Rockfeller Foundation fellowship and, eventually, landed a "czar" job at the White House.

And yet, somehow, despite all his success, this Ivy League-educated Fortunate Son sees nothing but misery and oppression everywhere. Am I the only one who finds this bizarre?

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! The Professor loves that Yalie stuff, eh? Anyway, just in case you hadn't noticed, FHA delinquency rates are now over 14%, which means it's time for . . . The Mother Of All Bailouts! (The Professor loves the gloom-and-doom, too.)

VIDEO: Glenn Beck exposes White House 'Green Jobs Czar' Van Jones

Van Jones featured in the (Oakland, Calif.) East Bay Express, Nov. 2, 2005:

Convinced that American society needed a wake-up call on race, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist, concluding that he would rather make news than report it. "If I'd been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect," he said. "But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school."
He arrived at Yale Law School wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag, an angry black separatist among a sea of clean-cut students dreaming of Supreme Court clerkships. "I wasn't ready for Yale, and they weren't ready for me," Jones said. . . .
In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia.

Oh, yeah, and wait until you hear about the "diversity czar" at the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Lloyd, and Lloyd's "battle plan" to shut down conservative broadcasting.

Sarah Palin is backing Beck against the boycotters who are trying to drive him off the air.