Progressives Look to Dan Rather for Salvation<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By Cliff Kincaid
 
If you want some indication of the disarray that the "progressives" find themselves in, consider that disgraced broadcaster Dan Rather will be keynoting a September 23 event sponsored by The Nation magazine on "What Will Become of the News?" The Nation calls Rather "legendary," ignoring how he was put out to pasture by CBS News after he used fake documents in 2004 to smear then-President Bush. Tickets to hear and see Rather are $200 each.
 
Rather is a legend in his own mind¯and apparently the minds of those left-wingers who appreciate his effort to defeat Bush's re-election bid and throw the election to Senator John Kerry. However, the effort backfired, thanks to conservative bloggers who exposed Rather's anti-Bush documents as fake. If liberals want to understand "What Will Become of the News?," they first have to understand what Rather & Company did to it. They seem ignorant.
Similarly, there are many "progressives" who pretend not to understand why Van Jones had to resign. 
 
One is John Nichols, writing on The Nation website, who says that Jones' signature on a 9/11 truth statement is comparable to a Republican congressman speaking at a teabagger rally with controversial signs in the audience or a talk-show host agreeing with callers claiming Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
 
Liberal blogger Jane Hamsher is mystified as well by the Jones exit, saying she remembers only about a year ago going to a Campaign for America's Future conference and noticing how Jones "was being swarmed by all of the liberal institutional elite…" But now, "he's being thrown under the bus…" There are photos of Jones posing with such luminaries as Bono, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
 
On the left-wing website AlterNet, Adele Stan insists that Jones was done in by oil interests. A variation on this theme was offered by Harvey Wasserman on the Rag Blog website, who claims Jones was a victim of "King CONG," standing for coal, oil, nukes, and gas.
 
Don Hazen and Arianna Huffington, who, it turns out, once employed Jones, are trying to put a happy face on his ouster, saying that he'll do better on the outside of government than on the inside. Huffington, who acquired her wealth from her ex-husband, Michael Huffington, who turned out to be a secret homosexual, was one of those whose endorsements had been featured on the back of Jones' book. She's got egg all over her face.
 
(We still need to find out how a sister company of Fox News published the Jones book, The Green Collar Economy).   
 
Nichols and Carl Davidson, also writing on the Rag Blog site, insist that "McCarthyism" did Jones in, which only serves to prove that the left finally understands that Senator Joseph McCarthy did go after real communists.
 
Jones was a real communist, which makes White House flak Robert Gibbs' statement to ABC News that Obama "thanks him for his service" very troubling but revealing.
 
Davidson, a friend of Obama, said my column posted on Saturday night¯hours before Jones resigned¯was the "motherlode," meaning that we had connected the dots between Jones and Obama himself, and that scrutiny of Jones would lead to Obama.
 
Here's what Davidson said, referring to my column: "Here's the motherlode piece fueling the rightwing blogosphere that helped bring down Van Jones. The text will show you that it won't stop here. They will use everything they can to cripple and take down Obama from the right, and will use more and more sham 'connections,' such as with me, to do it."
 
It's hardly a "sham connection" when Davidson, a Marxist and former SDS activist, has a history of working with Obama and was a member of the "Progressives for Obama" network. New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon has all of this and more.
 
This is what the "progressives" really fear¯that Obama himself will be unmasked. It should cause them further indigestion that Loudon was also the first to disclose that Obama's childhood mentor was Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. The major media didn't do much with that revelation last year, but after the Jones debacle things may change. Obama's radical past didn't begin in Chicago; it began in Hawaii. There are 600 pages of Davis's FBI file that reporters should take the time to go to go through. A 40-page summary is also available.  
 
Of course, it is past due for our media to start the investigation of Obama that they should have launched during the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign.
 
We are proud to have played a small role in uncovering the Van Jones scandal but much more needs to be done. We have Freedom of Information Act requests pending with Jones' former employer, The White House Council on Environmental Quality. It may be difficult for them to frustrate these requests, since we were quite specific about needing information on Jones' communications via email. It's time to stop the stonewalling.  
 
Now that Jones has been forced to resign, Trevor Loudon argues that "the focus needs to go on who hired him and why an easily identifiable communist revolutionary with a police record could serve as a presidential adviser." He explains, "The Obama administration boasted of its extreme vetting procedures, so I find it unlikely that if a blogger from New Zealand could identify Jones as a communist militant that the White House didn't know."
 
AIM is suggesting inquiries to FBI Director Robert Mueller and Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan.
 
Remember what they asked during the Watergate scandal: What did the President know, and when did he know it? This is a scandal much bigger than Watergate. There are Marxists in the White House.
 
As for Trevor Loudon, he promises, "more to come." Amen, brother.    
          Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.