Van Jones had to resign. It became inevitable when Gibbs offered no support.

Much of the blame for this incident lies squarely on the White House. The information used against Jones was freely available on the web. All it took was a search. I thought by hiring Jones they intended to take a chance on a real left progressive, but now it appears they were simply caught flat-footed. Either Valerie Jarrett -- Jones' champion in the upper echelons of the administration -- didn't know much about him or didn't widely share what she knew. They certainly seemed disinclined to mount a vigorous defense with Glenn Beck gnoshing on his favorite new chew toy and the health care reform battle about to heat up again. No distractions.

For the record, Jones isn't a truther. Five years ago, at the end of a busy paternity leave, he was asked to support the calls of 9/11 families for further investigation of the attacks (reflecting the concerns of millions of Americans). He agreed and his name ended up on a petition that contained language he didn't support. Three others who signed the petition have also come forward to say they were deceived about its final contents. But the truth of it hardly matters at this point. Jones has always spoken freely, not in the clipped, narrow confines permitted of those who aspire to public office. He talks real talk, in colorful, provocative language. There's plenty in his copious past writing and speaking that can be demagogued. This isn't a civic discussion among people who care who Van Jones really is or what he really believes, after all. It's a head hunt.

On substantive grounds, the resignation is not that significant. Part of the absurdity of all this is that Jones was basically a low-level functionary. By yesterday the dimwit conservative hack Dick Morris had him "in charge of running the cap-and-trade legislation" -- ignorant on too many levels to catalog -- but I doubt if Jones has ever so much as been in a meeting with Obama. By all accounts he was frustrated by the difficulty of getting even the smallest things done from the bottom of a massive bureaucracy. Even if he'd had the hidden intentions Beck and his pant-wetting audience attribute to every black liberal, he couldn't have done anything about it.

But policy, reality, that's not what bottom-feeders like Beck care about. The right governed the country for eight years and ran it into a ditch. Conservatives have no plausible health care solution, no climate solution. They have nothing to offer in response to the nation's pressing problems. What they have is affect. They have the amygdala, the fight-or-flight reflex. They have deep threads of racism, fear, and resentment.

In other words, they don't care what Van Jones does, they care what he is. Beck peddles a message that's been around since America was born: They're taking your country away. They -- the non-white races, the immigrants, the urbanites, the communists, the elites -- are stealing the country from nice, simple white Christians. They're taking what rightfully belongs to us, to Real Americans.

This basic, gut-level fear of loss, fear of tribal obsolescence and irrelevance, is all the 25%-and-shrinking right has left. It has been overwhelmed by its most paranoid, bigoted elements. Not activists, not online petitioners, but U.S. senators and Republican thought leaders say the president wasn't born in the U.S.; that he wants to kill old people; that he is not fit to speak to school children. They are banging drums and chanting just outside the campfire circle of rational civic discourse. Their din makes it impossible to think, to plan, to govern. They can not lead, but in their twisted fear they can prevent the rest of us from going anywhere either.

Our civic immune system has grown weak. There are no filters, no longer shared standards of evidence, truth, or decency. The poison courses unhindered through the body. Nothing, no matter how factually insane or morally repugnant, can be repelled.

Like I said, Beck's more greasy huckster than true believer. He went after Jones to get revenge on Color of Change, a group Jones co-founded, for targeting his advertisers (which are dropping like flies). Rupert Murdoch will only put up with the stench as long as money's coming in.

But make no mistake, it's racial resentment that blew this story up. The worst outcome of all this is that it will validate Beck and his long history of paranoid conspiracy theories and repugnant allegations. It will be like chum in the water, almost as invigorating to the crazies as bagging Dan Rather. Much, much more ugliness will ensue, and it will become that much harder to focus on the multiple crises converging on the country.

The White House will find someone else to tend green job-training programs; Jones will go back to his much more effective role as an activist. He will do much good in the world in his life, far, far more than a pissant charlatan like Glenn Beck. But I'm not as sanguine about the direction the country is headed.

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For McCain, it’s really all about the fake snow

In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi.

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The panel will consider options for revamping how the federal government manages environmental restoration and protection efforts in the region, which suffers from a serious coastal erosion problem.

The administration's budget and environmental offices will lead the effort, according to Sutley. The Corps will be part of the task force and continue to work on its projects in the Gulf, Sutley told Bloomberg:

"We thought it made sense to have an interagency working group on restoration that would include the Corps, but include other agencies as well," Sutley said. Discussions about how the group will be structured are in the early stages, she said.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently wrote a letter to Obama calling on him to reform the Corps and create just such a working group to address coastal restoration and flood protection. She told Bloomberg that she was "pleased that the President has responded to my request to elevate the challenges that face coastal Louisiana to a higher level of priority within the federal government."

As Facing South reported, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups held a press conference this week calling on the Corps to honor the president's pledge to restore wetlands that provide critical protection from storms.

The coalition noted that Congress directed the Corps to come up with a comprehensive plan for closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet navigation channel near New Orleans and restoring adjacent wetlands by May 2008. But the agency doesn't expect to complete its draft plan until next year.

In another example of slow movement by the Corps, it was more than four years ago that the agency completed a report recognizing the severe wetland loss in coastal Louisiana and recommending five critical restoration projects. Congress authorized those projects under the Water Resources Development Act of 2007 -- but only one is scheduled to begin construction before 2012. That meant none were eligible for funding as "shovel-ready" under the recent economic stimulus.

Louisiana officials recently offered recommendations for speeding up hurricane protection efforts. Pointing out that it currently takes an average of 40 years for the Corps to complete a project, they say the state's coastal communities don't have that much time.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Documents Show Sharp Dispute Took Place Over 9/11 Air Quality Information

Newly released government documents are finally providing Congressional Democrats with what they've been looking for: information about who was responsible for censoring data about Manhattan's air quality following the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Those documents reveal "screaming telephone calls" between the U.S. EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, as the council advocated for reassuring the public with calming language -- and incomplete information. The White House council objected to the posting of raw air-quality data on the Internet and said the EPA should leave it to the city of New York to issue health advisories -- an arrangement city health officials say they were unaware of. Tina Kreisher, then associate EPA administrator, said she "felt extreme pressure" from the White House council to understate the severity of the problem. Congressional Dems have held up the appointment of Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt (R) to head the EPA until the Bush administration answers questions about the air-quality cover-up.

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White House Task Force Proposes Alterations to NEPA

One of the nation's most important environmental laws could be fundamentally altered, if suggestions from a White House task force are implemented. A panel of the Council on Environmental Quality yesterday proposed dozens of changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1970 law that requires all major federal projects to be reviewed for their potential ecological impact. Industry groups have long complained that the environmental assessments and impact statements mandated by NEPA are too time-consuming, and the Bush administration has sought to change the law, for example by trying to eliminate assessments for some logging, highway building, airport construction, and energy exploration. Environmentalists support some of the task force recommendations -- including improving implementation of NEPA through new technology and better information management -- but oppose categorical exemptions to the law.

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The Bush White House seems to have teamed up with a conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to undermine the credibility of government scientists doing research on climate change. Myron Ebell, a director of CEI, which has received more than $1 million in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998, last summer sent an email to an official at the president's Council on Environmental Quality that indicates the White House sought his group's assistance in playing down an EPA report that said humans are contributing to the warming of the planet. "Thanks for calling and asking for our help," Ebell wrote, then went on to suggest ways to cast doubt on the report. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is crying foul: "This email indicates a secret initiative by the administration to invite and orchestrate a lawsuit against itself seeking to discredit an official U.S. government report on global warming dangers." Other recently uncovered internal government documents point to further White House efforts to suppress research into climate change.

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U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman told the New York Times Magazine that U.S. President Bush in January hadn't heard of the White House Office on Environmental Quality, the executive branch office responsible for enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act and coordinating the environmental policies of federal agencies. Whitman said that when Bush offered her the EPA job, he told her that she alone would be setting the administration's environmental policies. Whitman said, ''I asked him what the role for the Council on Environmental Quality would be, and he said: 'I don't even know what that is. I want you to be the environmental person.''' No word on whether Bush has since heard of the CEQ.

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