Two years after the worst marine oil spill in history, former WhiteHouse adviser Van Jones now admits that he and other progressives satquietly on the sidelines to avoid making President Obama look bad, as The Blaze notes:
You’ve never seen the environmental movement more quiet during an oilspill. I guarantee you, if John McCain had been president, with that oilspill, or George Bush had been president with that oil spill, I’d havebeen out there with a sign protesting. I didn’t, because of who thepresident was. Well, that’s a bad, uh, uh…that’s not good for the earth,it’s not good for the cause, it’s probably not good for the president.It’s certainly not the way we should conduct ourselves. And so, I’m very tough on progressive movements and leaders, includingmyself, who did not stand on principle, based on who we looked acrossand saw as president.
Conveniently, Jones’s admission against interest comes years after thefact at a time when the oil spill is fairly low on the nation’s radar.Though Jones’s comments seem limited to the Deepwater Horizon spill, thesame could really be said of the anti-war movement. There were largeprotests in many cities in 2007-2008 against the wars in Afghanistan andIraq. Once Obama took office, all of that public opposition meltedaway. This is despite the fact that Obama ordered a surge of troops inAfghanistan, failed to close the prison facility at Gitmo and actually increased the number ofdeadly drone strikes.
The mainstream media also deserves a lot of the blame here. It’sunderstandable why partisans like Van Jones would only speak up whentheir speech can be used against the GOP. What’s not clear is why thesupposedly neutral media also lost interest in the anti-war andenvironmentalist movements the moment Obama took office. It seems theMSM is just an echo chamber for progressive chatter, one that neithertones down obviously partisan attacks or plays up their absence when aDemocrat takes office.