The fall of Van Jones and the stealthy censorship of reasonableness

[Miss Authoritiva]

By Jeff McMahon,
True/Slant

If it meant the end of government service to call members of the opposing party “assholes,” a lot of promising careers would have ended this weekend with the resignation of White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones. Some past careers would have been relegated to history much earlier: Richard Nixon applied that expletive to Pierre Trudeau, you’ll recall, and George W. Bush attached it to Adam Clymer.

It may be too blunt a word for the West Wing, and it may also be self-defeating, an attack that harms only the speaker, making him seem too unreasonable for civil discourse. But it’s not a career-ender, as the Bush example demonstrates. To lose his job, Jones had to be associated, however flimsily, with a greater degree of unreasonableness.

Jones’s detractors dug up an old quote that failed the enduring test given to us by Sen. Joe McCarthy: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? In 2005, Jones told the East Bay Express that the 1992 Rodney King verdicts had turned him into a communist. But most damaging of all, apparently, was Jones’s name on a petition calling for the government to investigate its own complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jones increasingly appeared to be an unreasonable man in a White House that wants to effect change without seeming unreasonable. He began to look more like a liability than an asset for green jobs and environmental legislation. A crackerjack activist before he started wearing ties to work, he may be more effective outside of the White House than within it anyway.

But there’s a problem with this method of disqualifying unreasonable Americans from public service. Reasonableness is a function of the status quo. Times occasionally call for measures that shake up the status quo, and both economically and environmentally, this is one of those times….

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[BooBluePotion]

1. Calling someone "A Major League Asshole"

And being the cause of 9/11 is ok with the rightwing media.