Can we question their patriotism now? Jane Hamsher not only claims that 9/11 trutherism is the mainstream of Democratic politics (and the head scratching logic she uses to get to this conclusion makes me question her sanity) but she goes on to claim, get this, that Obama isn’t far enough to the left because he won’t allow her friends to attack the Blue Dog Democrats and the American Medical Association! You know, because what would advance the liberal agenda more than eating their own and to be seen publicly calling doctors scumbags.

First the trutherism:

I first met Van Jones when he was honored last year by the Campaign for America’s Future at their gala dinner.  He was being swarmed by all of the liberal institutional elite, who just could not be more full of praise for the impressive environmental leader and prison reform organizer.  Everybody wanted Van Jones on their board.  Everyone wanted him at their fundraisers.  Everyone wanted a piece of his formidable limelight.

Now he’s been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.  Well, that and calling Republicans “assholes.”  I’m pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.

So where are all the statements defending Van Jones by those who were willing to exploit him when it served their purpose?  Why aren’t they standing up  and defending one of their own, who has done nothing that probably the majority of people in the Democratic party haven’t done at one time or another?  Is he no longer “one of their own?”

So 35% of a group of people is the mainstream? Because the poll to which she alludes is more correctly interpreted as meaning the mainstream Democrat view (65%) reject conspiracy mongering. We on the right say 35% is a horrifically high number of people who believe a conspiracy propagated by Alex Jones and his ilk. This is just more evidence of Hamsher’s essential insulation from reality.

Then she begins telling stories out of school about her own fairly conspiratorial dealings with liberal special interest groups and the White House, hamshering (a word I am now officially coining) her relationship with the web of Soros funded Communist insurgencies that allows the hack producer of horrible films to be part of the elite who think they will one day rule America. As an aside, the only good movie Hamsher was ever involved with was From Hell, which was an elaborate conspiracy fantasy, like 9/11 being allowed to happen.

Hamsher herself seems upset that Obama and his crew aren’t involved in a conspiracy with her that would include Stalin-esque purges of moderates, attacks on the American Medical Association and most bizarrely a coordinated campaign by the White House with the Soros groups surrounding it to defend not just Van Jones, but trutherism, anti-Capitalism and full on Bolivarism:

Soon after the election, the Administration began corralling the big liberal DC interest groups into a variety of organizations and communication networks through which they telegraphed their wishes — into a virtual veal pen.  The 8:45 am morning call co-hosted by the “liberal” Center for American Progress, Unity 09, and Common Purpose are just a few of the overt ways that the White House controls its left flank and maintains discipline.

My own experience with the Veal Pen came indirectly, when some of them had the temerity to launch a campaign against Blue Dogs.  They were rebuked and humiliated in front of their peers as a lesson to them all at a Common Purpose meeting, which is run by lobbyist Erik Smith.  White House communications director Ellen Moran attends.  It isn’t an arms-length relationship between these groups and the administration.

A few weeks ago, Rahm Emanuel showed up at a Common Purpose meeting and called these liberal groups “fucking stupid” for going after Blue Dogs on health care and ordered them not to do so any more.  Since that time, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have.

In other words Obama and the Democrats were supposed to be taking marching orders from the rich, White progressive elites and he hasn’t knuckled under yet. Jane and company wanted a good old fashioned purge of Conservative Democrats (holding what were Republican seats) and the Democrats have the nerve to try to, I don’t know, keep those seats. Then the spurned Hamsher hits Obama directly:

 When the White House met with bankers after the AIG scandal and they said they didn’t want to be criticized for getting huge bonuses paid for by taxpayers, the White House complied and “cooled their rhetoric.”  The President told the public that Timothy Geithner had been instructed to do everything in his power to claw back those bonuses, and the House passed a bill doing just that.  But it died in the Senate.

You remember all those campaigns by the unions, by the online groups, by liberal economics and finance organizations pushing the Senate to take it up?

Yeah, me either.

Which means that the teabaggers were in perfect position to harvest all of the discontent over the bank bailout, and no coherent liberal critique was offered.  I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly.  The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise.   It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving  institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.

And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent.  They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out.  How many have openly pushed back against the Administration on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or DOMA? Well, not many.  Most tried to satisfy their LGBT members by outsourcing activism to other organizations, or proving their bona fides by getting involved in the Prop 8 battle that is not directly toxic to the White House.  It’s a chickenshit sidestep that betrays their members in the interest of personal gain, which they justify with feeble self-serving palliatives about the importance of “maintaining a seat at the table.”

Where are they on health care?  Why aren’t they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?

Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?

Needless to say, this criticism of the Obama administration’s corporatism is racist.But what kind of fascist do you have to be to suggest that rather than run ads promoting your health care platform you should run attack ads on doctors and hospitals? The same people you want to work in this new system of yours. It’s almost as if she and other health care proponents are willing to force people to work in a system they don’t like.

Of course Hamsher returns to Jones. Like a schoolgirl with a crush on the motorcycle riding dropout with the Warrant tattoo on his bicep, Hamsher just can’t believe everyone isn’t rising to the defense of misunderstood bad boy Van Jones. And the lack of support for a man who claims White environmentalists are in cahoots with evil corporations to poison Black folk among those same White environmentalists is a moral outrage that cannot be unchallenged:

If these groups, if these liberal leaders, let Jones just hang there while Glenn Beck pounds his chest and celebrates the scalp, we have no liberal institutions.  What we have are a bunch of neoliberal enablers who have found a nice comfortable place in the DC establishment that they don’t want to jeopardize, a place on the new K-Street gravy train that they don’t want to lose.  Dropping Van Jones from their rolodex is a small price to pay.

If there is going to be a serious progressive movement in this country capable of standing up for health care against an industry that spends $1.4 million a day on lobbying, we can’t just look to the members of the Progressive Caucus and say “hey, you, get something done.”  They need cover.  They need to know that they will be supported.  And people like Van Jones who have given their lives to causes we say we value like prison reform and environmental advocacy need to know that they will be defended, and not handed over to Glenn Beck as an acceptable casualty in the battle for K-Street dollars.

So to all you liberal organizations in the “veal pen” — this is your moment of truth.  I get all your emails.  And the next Common Purpose meeting is probably on Tuesday.  If you can’t get it together to at least put out a statement of support for Van Jones and condemn the White House for using him as a sacrificial lamb to right wing extremists that will devour us all if left unchecked, it’s time to add “proudly liberal only when it doesn’t matter” to your logo and be done with it.

Van Jones wants the same people she is asking to support him to be held responsible for racial and class grievances he has largely made up. Van Jones wants to take all the money Hamsher makes on royalties and distribute it to others. Van Jones believes Hamsher herself is part of the problem, yet she squirted out this call for progressives to stand with him in orgasmic ignorance of what Jones stands for. She shrilly decries the White House doing to her and her progressive friends what she encourages Jones to do to me and other people on the right. It is a fantasy based view of the world she has, where conspiracy theories are acceptable, conspiring with radicals to overturn capitalism is acceptable (and consequenceless), and the only real sin is not conforming to her armchair Marxist view of the world. She accuses Obama of being a “neoliberal” in her piece which is the leftist version of our own and overused RINO, in other words she’s saying Obama’s basically a wingnut, like everyone on the right.

But reading through her childishly angry tirade, just the latest in a long career of outlandishness, who is really the nut? The woman supporting Trutherism or the Democrats trying to stay in power?

h/t Just One Minute