Deconstructing the "Whup Ass" -Victor Davis Hanson: Obama & Jones’ lucrative anti-capitalist careers

At one point, the Obama administration was bragging about bagging one Van Jones; Valerie Jarrett, in fact, even gushed that they had been scouting the erstwhile mostly unknown Jones for quite a while. The word czar was employed of his new responsibilities, and we were subsequently lectured that “over $80 million” in stimulus money was going to be under Jones’s control—given his innovative “green jobs” approach that married civil rights with radical environmentalism.

And now? The ministry has downgraded that now inoperative statement, and insisted that Jones, after all, was not really an unexamined czar, but rather a mere informal “advisor”.

Jones himself, without any introspection, alleged that some vicious “smear campaign” did him in, but did not elaborate on what he meant. Is it not one thing to invoke the bogeyman Glenn Beck, but quite another to list in detail the ways in which Jones had been defamed and lied about?

Had Jones not signed a Truther petition, asking to investigate George Bush’s supposed role in 9/11 (Re: on the one hand, we are supposed to believe that Jones was a brilliant Yale law graduate,* on the other that he did not understand the simple English wording of the petition?), he might have survived the other inanities.

We can attribute his “Republicans are a—holes” remark to lecture theatrics. I don’t care whether he fashionably claims he was some sort of radicalized communist, or even worry much about all the other silly, melodramatic self-characterizations of his own would-be importance. But the racist slurs about white polluters of the ghetto, the white mass murderers in the schools, and George Bush the petroleum crack-head were the sort of things that usually get one fired or demoted (cf. Trent Lott’s remark).

What we are now seeing with Obama’s coterie is a sort of Billy Carterism—after a while what seems at first outlandish gradually becomes repugnant. Half of the country is now furious at Obama because they are starting to see that Ayers, Khalidi, Meeks, Pfleger, and Wright were representational, rather than aberrational; that is, the associates that for 30 years were the natural friends and role models of Obama proved hard to shake and appear buffoonish 24/7. And stranger still, Obama himself seems surprised that they keep reappearing, as if one so easily can throw under the bus decades of choices, attitudes, and second natures.

There is a strange pseudo-culture in America, of which Obama is a perfect example. Millionaire Michael Moore announces, “Capitalism is evil” as he hypes promotion of his moneymaking new movie. Oliver Stones praises Chavez, as the dictator shuts down voices of dissent—yet Stone himself could not make a movie in Venezuela as he does here. So too the murderer Che becomes a popular T-shirt emblem among the college elite. Van Jones calls Bush a “crackhead” but then in self-important style flashes on his website, “As a tireless advocate for disadvantaged people and the environment, Van helped to pass America’s first ‘green job training’ legislation: the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill.” Bush is a crackhead in front of some audiences, compliant supporter to others?

Otherwise quite content Americans, getting rich and famous in the free market under the aegis of U.S. freedom and security, have not only the luxury to play the court jester, but see it as a wise investment. Moore would never go to Cuba for brain surgery. Stone would never criticize the Bolivian government while he was living in Bolivia. No Harvard undergraduate would have liked to join occasionally murderous Che in the jungle.

So too it is with middle-class guys like Jones and Obama. Barack Obama, raised by white grandparents, sent to prep school, and educated at the Ivy League, realized that avenues are not so easily opened to the nerdy Barry Dunhams of the world. Jones grasped that one Anthony Jones who was admitted to Yale Law School might actually have to study, compete for grades, and then go apprentice at a grinding law firm entry-level job.

But as Jones relates, it was far easier to be a “hell raiser” at Yale. What that meant I think was that in lieu of studying (“Yale didn’t have any grades”), Jones knew that he could say and do almost anything he wished among rather wealthy (and to be honest, rather nerdy) white and Asian people, playing on both their guilt, and on their vicarious sense of adventure and cutting-age revolutionary romance—and do pretty well. And so he did.

Very quickly, as his subsequent career attests in a variety of “organizing” jobs, Jones discovered that he could tease and provoke white liberals by posing as some sort of wild (but actually quite safe) revolutionary figure who would call America an “apartheid” system, or dream of a “redistribution of wealth” or praise the advantages of social revolution through hip hop music (”I don’t believe the true power of the people can be confined to a ballot box…We need to be about the whup-ass. Somebody’s f***in up somewhere… They have names and job descriptions. You have to be creative about how you engage the enemy, because if you do it on his terms, the outcome is already known.”)—all the while living a rather mundane bourgeois existence jetting around for princely lecture fees, hyping a book, trying to button-hole celebrities, and finally getting close to his exemplar Barack Obama—who likewise had parlayed Barry Dunham of a Honolulu prep school into Barack Obama, exotic avatar of revolutionary hope and change.

The two almost on spec can turn on the authentic “street talk” cadences when they wish to seem romantic to liberals and authentic to minorities, and then without thinking switch into nerdese when they wish to convince politicians and the public at large that they are properly circumspect and wonikish—and they can do all this in the classical delusion that one who creates inauthentic identities at opportune times, will not himself finally be disbelieved by all. In short, I think Obama has become Geraldo at month nine of his four-year term.

Had Van Jones wished to help Americans transcend its energy crisis by marrying minority concerns with environmentalism, he could have quietly dropped all the police-monitoring, race-baiting, and narcissistic agitation, and simply stayed hard at work in Oakland, convincing residents to curtail drug usage, illegitimacy, and gang violence and instead install solar panels, use hybrids, and fix up energy-inefficient homes—the sort of things that corporations are eager to subsidize. Such workmanlike public service, however, does not really allow one to change one’s name, reinvent oneself as Trotsky on the barricades, and tease out of liberals a quite good career.

None of this is really new. Bill Ayers went right back to Chicago for his inheritance and influence-peddling and resumed the prep-school existence bequeathed to him by his father— that alone offered the platform and subsidies to spout off in praise of Hugo Chavez. Such a faux-persona made him romantic and “neat” in the way a tweedy liberal professor in the school of education churning out studies supporting affirmative action is not.

If the corporate-created money in the Ivy League, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the George Soros think-tanks, or NPR wishes to either subsidize or publicize radical-chic agit-prop, it seems no different than the networks running sitcoms, that likewise are sometimes funny, but usually banal.

No, the rub in my mind comes in when the public is asked to accept a Czar who boasts “about the whup-ass. Somebody’s f***in up somewhere… They have names and job descriptions. You have to be creative about how you engage the enemy, because if you do it on his terms, the outcome is already known.” I prefer that our taxes not go to subsidize that world view, or for that matter anyone who promotes the lie that his own government was responsible for murdering 3,000 of its own, rather than radical Islamic killers led by Mohammed Atta on the orders of Osama bin Laden.

Van Jones can do his “whup ass” through corporate benefactions, but not on Joe Sixpack’s weekly tax deductions. At least I think that is what the controversy is all about. Had Jones been white, Asian, or Hispanic, and in his many diatribes just substituted the word “black” when he employed “white”, and replaced “Bush” with “Obama,” then the Left would really have conducted a smear campaign. But such are the times we live in, that a Jones feels he can abuse the public discourse and insult the intelligence of the public, confident that when called on it, the refuge of “racist”! is always there.

What to make of all this, the rather insignificant firing of a rather insignificant administration official?

Barak Obama did not transcend race as promised. Nor was there a racial backlash against him as his supporters both feared and now charge.

Rather the mood is weariness. One major reason Obama’s polls have dropped is the public resentment of this spate of allegations of racism.

The slurring of the police in response to the Gates’s rants seems to be amplified ad nauseam by others around Obama or his supporters in general. Racism we are told explains why the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee won’t pay his taxes (at least I think his own sinking star is why Rangel lashed out at supposedly racist Americans opposed to the health care bill). Racism accounts for the poor political skills of the Governor of New York. Racism is the font of the Town Hall movement. And racism explains why one must resign from a US government that he has accused of murdering 3,000 of his own, when bin Laden himself had repeatedly bragged of his authorship of such mass destruction.

Nothing is so fatal to a con as boredom. Tragically, when a Rangel, Paterson, Jones, or Obama - all enjoying privileges and successes that 300 million Americans might only dream of - start in on the now accustomed trope, the public turns the channel and sighs “Been there, done that.” And I think they really mean it this time.

*Here is Jones on his Yale Law education, a version of the Jason Blair post facto trashing of the New York Times: I was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn’t have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I’m guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hell raiser student, and they can’t do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.

Lucky you, you're younger than me!
Billy Carter was the notorious and comical fun-loving brother of President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). There were a few interesting episodes, a diplomatic trip to Libya and an incident of public urination. Then, great American free enterprise - Billy Beer. Can collectors will remember. Hey, it was the 1970s. Half the country was baked then.

From Wikipedia: "In 1977, he endorsed Billy Beer capitalizing upon his colorful image as a beer-drinking Southern boy that had developed in the press when his brother ran for President. Carter's name was occasionally used as a gag answer for a Washington, D.C., trouble-maker on 1970s episodes of The Match Game. Carter was known for his outlandish public behavior. For example, he once urinated on an airport runway in full view of the press and dignitaries."

Actor Gary Busey played the role on Saturday Night Live, beer can in hand. Think Bill Clinton without the Yale and Georgetown degrees.

When has the left not been about being chic, cool? They're terminal hipsters that trade in self righteous cultural platitudes. Never are they about cultivating their ideology while cutting sugarcane with the proletariat in Cuba, with the unwashed peasants. These are spoiled mama's boys out to make a name for themselves as the new Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs for our times — book writing for the coffeehouse Starbuck crowd revolutionaries.

I think Obama thinks that we should dig his cool choices. His scooping up Jones makes him proud as a television network producer is proud to scoop up some raw talent. And that's what they have in common: an appeal to pure entertainment. Coffee house revolutionaries will love the over-the-top antics, the risque language, the whole shtick. They will drink their coffee and lattes in safety and laugh. A sign in the house of revolution should say: Get your unmolested, free range, enviro-green coffee beans here with every new book about the evils of Capitalism and Bush. Do the right thing America. Be cool.

So much for Howard Dean’s comment that Jones is ‘brilliant’ and a grad from Yale Law School....I understand Yale Law School does not give grades to their students.

So much for ‘brilliant’.”

A. Yale, Harvard, and all the other well-known schools need to review their admission policies. They are not educating persons who will be an improvement to the USA and it’s future. They are giving legitimacy in title to radicals whose only aim in the future is to destroy the country that gave them the opportunities with lots of taxpayer money, all the way from kindergarten on up.

B. ‘Brilliant’ “ A STAR”... comments by Howard Dean which leave me to wonder just exactly what kind of education Dean himself ever had. The world is upside down inside Dean’s head, IMO. I got my grade school education in a one room school-14 kids-8 grades-one teacher and none of the verbal skills I learned there include these kinds of definition applications such as Dean is using.

C. I am wondering even more about the sanity of Howard Dean in general. He had his own screaming tirade some months ago, and altho the delivery now is less intrusive, the content is more suspect. I am doubting that Dean could survive a serious 72 hour psychological exam which is routinely given to other whackos. This man is seriously deranged, and the country needs to ask themselves WHY he continued to control the Democrat party for so long a time.

D. Those of you who voted for NObama and other Dems need to look into the mirror and ask yourselves if you would do it all over again. While you are at that task, ask yourself why you didn’t stop ACORN from committing all that voter fraud in the name of the party you seem to love so dearly and follow so blindly?

It is time- in fact, well past time, for rank and file Democrats in this country to ask themselves if this is the country that they want which has been handed to them by NObama and his minions and czars.
They need to ask themselves if they have allwed their votes to put into place a coup against the USA as a whole.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.