Van Jones: Minimum and Maximum Goals and Revolution

I want to know who vetted Van Jones.

Didn't he take the Obama Administration's Questionnaire?

Here is the full text of the questionnaire.

Number 63 is so broad, and all-encompassing. It serves as a kind of a clean-up item.

(63) Please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect.

I think in the case of Van Jones, it would be easier for him to provide the information that wouldn't be a source of embarrassment to Obama.

Here's something "embarrassing" -- an interview that Jones did on Uprising Radio in April of 2008.

From Naked Emperor News, via Breitbart:

VAN JONES: One of the things that has happened too often to progressives is that we don't understand the relationship between minimum goals and maximum goals.

Right after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, if the civil rights leaders had jumped out and said, 'OK, now we want reparations for slavery; we want redistribution of all wealth; and we want to legalize mixed marriages,' if that had been their..., if they'd have come out with a maximum program the very next day, they'd have been laughed at.

Instead, they came out with a very minimum program. You know, 'we just want to integrate these buses.' The students [inaudible] came out with a very minimum program. 'We just want to sit at the lunch counter.' But inside that minimum demand was a very radical kernel that eventually meant that from 1954 to 1968, complete revolution was on the table for this country.

And I think that this green movement has to pursue those same steps and stages. Right now we're saying we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to some kind of eco-capitalism where you know, at least we're not, you know, fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet.

Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond systems of exploitations and oppression altogether, but that's a process. And I think what's great about the movement that is beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both very pragmatic and very visionary. So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we're going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.

Being one of Obama's czars, Jones probably didn't face the scrutiny of a tough or semi-tough or slightly tough vetting process to be appointed to his post, That said, the White House had to have some set of minimal standards the czars had to meet.

If Jones' radicalism didn't disqualify him, what would disqualify someone from having a place in Obama's administration?

We know Van Jones is a radical, an extremist. But what is White House SENIOR ADVISER Valerie Jarrett doing speaking about Jones in such a glowing fashion as recently as August 2009?

VALERIE JARRETT: We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We've been watching him really for, he's not that old, but for as long as he's been active out in Oakland, and all the ways that he has, creative ideas that he has. So now we have captured that, and we have all that energy and enthusiam in the White House.

There's not just a problem with Jones. There's a problem with the Obama administration.