Jack & Jill Politics

For the past couple of weeks, Glenn Beck, and really, Fox News as a whole has been going after Van Jones because of his association with Color of Change and the boycott they’ve been running. Beck has employed a number of nutty conspiracy theories about Jones in order to discredit him–but Jones is probably in serious trouble now, and it’s not because of Beck’s conspiracy theories. It’s because of Jones’.

President Obama’s “green jobs” adviser could become a mounting liability for the Obama administration, as the latest revelation about Van Jones shows his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks could have been an inside job.

Jones joined the “9/11 truther” movement by signing a statement in 2004 calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggests “people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

The Bush administration did a lot of bad things, but believing they deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen is nuts. There isn’t any evidence for it.  But what I think doesn’t matter–what matters is that most of the country thinks it’s nuts, and the Obama administration will likely have to dump Jones to quell the controversy.

Here’s the part that I don’t understand though: How is it that believing 9/11 was an inside job is beyond the pale, but it’s perfectly acceptable to be an elected member of Congress who thinks the President of the United States was born in Kenya?