THE END OF A MINOR STORY

Drudge pal Andrew Breitbart, writing about Van Jones in The Washington Times (emphasis added):

Inevitably, the American mainstream media -- ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al -- must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down....

For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones....

Yeah, right -- it was such a "major story" that most people never bothered to pay attention when it "went viral on YouTube" and spread in the right-wing mediasphere. You know what, Andrew? "The American mainstream media" didn't give saturation coverage to Susan Boyle, either, at least at first -- and yet huge numbers of Americans found out who she was. This didn't "go viral" except among your circle of crazies, Andrew, because most Americans don't give a crap.

Trust me -- I was out of Internet range for most of the weekend, and in the real world this is a very low-level story. Remember, Jones was a relatively minor appointee.

I'm sticking with my argument that if you're president it's perfectly valid to draw a bright line and say that no 9/11 truthers deserve to serve in your administration, however marvelous they may be otherwise. (And no, it is not too much to expect that a Yale Law graduate will read a damn document before signing it, and will know that signing one that says "evidence ... suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur" is an unambiguous personal endorsement of trutherism.) The point of my last post is that this happens to presidential administrations; a president and an administration are more important than any individual, and the standard response is to let the appointee go and move on. (And a president with controversial appointees may still be proclaimed as "beloved" after he's gone.)

Even lunatic McCarthyites may turn up something valid on an administration once in a while. But Glenn Beck has learned the wrong lesson, and that gives me some hope: he's out there asking his Twitter readers (in all caps) to "FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER" and also tweeting, "Van Jones is the tip of the iceberg. If we understand [Obama] by who he surrounds himself with as HE told us, what does [Van Jones's] 9/11 truther stuff tell us about [Obama's] Middle East policy?" -- which means he still maintains an insane belief in an interlinked commie/anti-American conspiracy centered in the Obama White House.

(I would have assumed that Jones was the evil linchpin of this Conspiracy So Vast. Now Jones is gone. So whither the conspiracy? Why would the evil Coup Master in the Oval Office sacrifice his sinister consigliere without a huge fight?)

Look, Beck can't really find anything on these guys because his "COMMUNISM! COMMUNISM!" theory is utterly absurd. (The 9/11 stuff on Van Jones wasn't Beck's find -- that was unearthed by the right blogosphere. That's probably because Beck and his crack staff were too busy Googling "van jones" engels and "van jones" stalin.)

In some ways, I want Beck to continue pursuing a theory unsupported by evidence. Jones is gone, but what else is Beck going to find following this line of "reasoning"? At most, another inappropriate petition signed by some other appointee most Americans have never heard of?

Please, Glenn -- devote all your effo rts to replicating this great coup of yours. Persuade yourself that lightning can strike twice in the same place.

Of course, it would be nice if, while Beck is doing the Snoopy dance and spiking the ball in the end zone, someone apart from the usual bloggers and MSNBC prime-time hosts were trying to devise a way to make Beck himself the issue, and thus the Republicans problem....