On yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt show, Mark Steyn noted the absurdity of Van Jones’ position:

HH: In Obama’s America, Van Jones has come to great prominence. Today, the latest, he’s President Obama’s green jobs advisor, last night he had to apologize for calling Republicans a**holes.

MS: Right.

HH: And the remark said they do not reflect the view of this administration. Actually, I think they do reflect the views of this administration. But today, it was revealed, he’s a truther. He joined, in 2004, he signed a statement calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggest high level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11^th attacks to occur. How long would a Bush administration official who called Democrats a**holes and was a truther lasted, Mark Steyn?

MS: Exactly. I mean, this is the thing. We’re supposed to be the crazy guys. We’re supposed to be the ones who don’t distance ourselves from the loons. You know, we’re the…Glenn Beck is supposed to be bananas. The birther movement are supposed to be the nuts. And yet, and yet, it is somehow the reality-based community, or whatever these guys call themselves, that has managed to put a 9/11 truther two doors away from President Obama in the Oval Office. And if he really thinks that the federal government pulled off 9/11, then he’s inside the system. Why doesn’t he uncover the truth of it? He’s the green jobs czar. Presumably, in the previous administration, George W. Bush was the steel melting czar. So why doesn’t he just take a look in the filing cabinets, and expose the truth on it? It’s an absolute, it’s not just ludicrous, but it is absolutely outrageous that this fellow has been appointed as one of Obama’s various czars. What I found interesting about the guy is that he’s a communist. Now I assume when people say oh, he used to be a communist, that they were communists in the 60s or 70s, you know, when it was cool, the spirit of 1968 and all that. This guy became a communist in the 90s. He became a communist after the Russians and the Bulgarians and the Romanians and the Czechs and even partly the Chinese, and even the Vietnamese had all given up on it.

Meanwhile, Kathy Shaidle points out that she was likely the first person to utter the comment that Glenn Beck made yesterday regarding Jones. As Steyn wrote in 2006:

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that’s one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

“I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don’t think I could still live here. I’m not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?”

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

And over to you, Van, and President Obama. In addition to all of the other largely self-inflicted wounds to his administration, Obama has to deal with man who believes the perfect trifecta of radical chic idiocy: 9/11 “truther”, self admitted communist (scroll down to highlighted quote in this 2005 profile) and supporter of cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal.