Personal Aside: Flash! Van Jones was Fired Because He’s Black Writes Sun-Times’ Mary Mitchell.

Every columnist at the Sun-Times is expected to take a particular left-wing slant in their commentary (except Steve Huntley who is a relic of the paper’s respectable past). Neil Steinberg is the smart aleck wise-guy who serves up a left-wing urban brackish accented stance that is supposed to woo atheists, agnostics and doubters, because of which when he appears he gets a full page from his paper’s editors. Richard Roeper is the eternally young, single, swinger sophisticate…leftwing of course…who is hired to ingratiate himself with young people (although he’s getting rather long in the tooth for that assignment).

Carol Marin plays the idealistic liberal Catholic (angry at the Church: why can’t there be women priests? Why does it not marry gays? Why can’t the Pope be more like Cardinal Bernardin?) who comes fresh from a college campus…but it was in the late `50s if you look closely… and is appalled…I tell you APPALLED…at political corruption without the faintest sense of how politics works since she has been for many decades a habitué of TV makeup studios before going on to read the news prime time (which she graduated from some years ago after she passed her own prime time). Her views are so unusual that she has been given a monopoly: a correspondent’s role on WTTW (stands for Wilmette Talking to Winnetka) paid partially with federal money, a correspondent’s role at NBC-5 and political columnist for the Sun-Times. I tell you no one else…and I mean NO ONE…has the views that Carol Marin has: they are so distinctive, so atypical of mainstream television media so…—oh forget it.

Then we get to Mary Mitchell. She’s cast by the Sun-Times marketing schema as the angry black woman…true, mad at some black men…but principally mad at whitey for exploiting her people. It’s about Mary Mitchell that I write today because her column yesterday alleged that Van Jones was fired because he is black. Oh, I forgot. If you read the Sun-Times you wouldn’t know who Van Jones is since the paper has put the kibosh on news unfavorable to Obama…and Lynn Sweet has been uncharacteristically mum (probably is glad she’s on vacation). Van Jones is a poor, exploited black man who has a Yale law degree who has been victimized, says Mitchell, because of his race.

His story is very sad. He was born black in Jackson, Tennessee. There: that’s sad, isn’t it? Worse, he was born in the black middle-class, father a junior high school principal and mother a high school teacher. Can you imagine how exploitative that could be?

With that background he has a lot to be angry about because whitey has—oh God how whitey has exploited him! His grandfather was…get this…an Episcopalian…and young Van (Anthony to be correct) would go with the old man to church conferences and be forced to sit—get this!—in “these hot, sweaty black churches” as he says in his autobiography published in Wikipedia. That was torture enough but then this young exploited man was forced…forced I tell you…to go to the University of Tennessee where he received his bachelor’s degree. And then rooted up and sent to that citadel of white power, New Haven, Connecticut founded in 1701 by WHITES, I tell you…and forced to go to Yale Law School there. Well let me tell you it did not take long until the insidious powers of the punitive capitalist-dominated, oppressive society got him arrested. You want to know how that happened?

Young Van got himself arrested because he was engaged in a student protest in San Francisco in behalf of Rodney King. God, it was terrible! Yes, the district attorney dropped the charges but the anger welled up in Jones and “the incident”…I can hardly finish this …the incident, he says, “deepened my disaffection with the system and accelerated by political radicalization.” No wonder! Born to a junior high principal and his wife a teacher, with a BA and matriculating at Yale: who wouldn’t be angered at the system? WHO WOULDN’T? So understandably when he got his Yale law degree, he moved to San Francisco where he got involved with other young exploited victims of the system in a group called STORM: “Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement”…a group explicitly committed to revolutionary Marxist politics whose points of unity—as he says in his biography—“were revolutionary democracy”…ah yes, revolutionary democracy which is far different from ordinary democracy “revolutionary feminism”…much different that ordinary feminism “revolutionary internationalism” radically different than regular internationalism “the central role of the working class”…extolling government to elevate—and I mean ELEVATE—the working class…“urban Marxism”…far different from rural or suburban or exurban Marxism…and finally “Third World Communism.” While other grads of Yale were working and practicing law, Van was growing…I mean GROWING!

When Hurricane Katrina came there was Van forming a group to examine the horror that was visited on blacks in New Orleans as distinct from whites. You see blacks were direly affected by the rising flood waters. What? You say whites were as well? Forget it! We’re talking black suffering now. BLACK SUFFERING, do you get it?

Then in 2005 young Van Jones discovered eco-capitalism, declaring “if we really wanted to help our communities escape the cycle of incarceration, we had to start focusing on job, wealth and health” (“wealth and health” rhymes, get it?) “creation.” Then he wrote a book called “The Green Color Economy.” You think someone interested in green-colored capitalism would be interested in the private sector? Think again. He extolled government investing…that word’s INVESTING meaning spending tax dollars…in eco and green jobs for the poor.

What a background! Or…what? A background? Anyhow in reward for his activism he has received…to give him psychic repayment for his suffering…the following awards: 1997-1999 Rockefeller Foundation “Next Generation Leadership Fellowship…1998 Reebok International Human Rights Award…2000 International Ashoka Fellowship…2008 Best Dressed Environmental List (yes, that’s right: best dressed)…2008 Time Magazine Environmental Hero…2008 Elle Magazine Green Award…2008 George Lucas Foundation’s “Daring Dozen”…2008 Hunt Prime Mover Award…2008 Campaign for America’s Future Paul Wellstone Award…2008 Global Green USA Community Environmental Leadership Award…2008 San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award…2008 World Economic Forum: “Young Global Leader”…2009 Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award…2009 Eco-Entrepreneur Award, Institute for Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Innovation, Howard University…2009 Individual Thought Leadership, Energy & Environment Awards, Aspen Institute.

With discrimination, debasement and humiliation like that it is no wonder that young Van began to hate the system. He became and signed up for membership as a 9/11 “truther,” charging that George W. Bush either fomented personally or stood by wantonly while terrorists attacked. He became a self-admitted Communist who stood in the streets after 9/11 with a Maoist organization he founded that denounced this country for bringing the terrorist attacks on itself. It’s no wonder that with this terrible cycle of discrimination he endured he brought himself to write last January that “white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don’t have a racial justice flame.”

As result of his agonizing suffering of discrimination, it is no wonder that he appealed to Valerie Jarrett, a key adviser to President Obama and no wonder further that he was allowed to skip filling out the 700-page vetting paper before he was appointed to his White House position.

Now We Get to Mary Mitchell.

Aroused, angered at whitey, Mary Mitchell yesterday wrote her

column that saw only race as the reason Van Jones was fired. Of course to

Mary everything is race anyhow. Nothing else. But also Jones’ “biggest sin

was calling Republicans the `a’ word,” she said. Oh yes, then she added

this:

“He also signed a petition that questioned whether the Bush administration

officials might have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen as a pretext of

war.” She added, “As ridiculous as that might sound”…might sound, get

it?...”a lot of black people distrusted Bush to the point that they thought

anything was possible.” Oh, okay, Mary. If a lot of black people felt that

way it kind of gives Jones a pass, doesn’t it?

“I can see how Jones, the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human

Rights ended up signing the meaningless [sic] petition.” Meaningless.

So she can understand what in World War II under Franklin Roosevelt

and in World War I under Woodrow Wilson would have been criminal

sedition.

Sun-Times…from top to bottom…you have no shame, not even a

miniscule sense of loyalty to this country by allowing a shameless racial

incendiary demagogue like Mitchell to write this stuff…which is an insult to

all of us including the millions of loyal blacks who believe otherwise

and who have patriotically served their country in war and peace. God…l is

selling your worthless tabloid that important that you allow yourself to

purvey this tripe? John Barron among others: what are you thinking?

What ought to happen to you is a readers and advertising boycott to

bring you to your senses for allowing Mitchell to display her execrably

unpatriotic and near fascistic insult to our system.