You’ll want to read Rich Lowry over on the homepage:

How did a radical agitator like Jones arrive in the Obama administration? He’s just part of the fraternity. “We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House,” Valerie Jarrett said a few weeks ago. “We were watching him.” In its story about his ouster, the Washington Post called him a “towering figure” in the environmental movement.
Jones had been the Great Black Hope of environmentalism. The movement is only slightly less white than the Daughters of the American Revolution. So it naturally took to Jones with his racially charged rhetoric about “greening the ghetto.” He offered street cred the average vanilla-latte environmentalist lacked.
For Jones, the environmental movement is a perfect vehicle. In today’s America, it is the most natural place for someone with Marxist sensibilities and aspirations outside a college English department. A frontal assault on capitalism on behalf of the working people of the world is passé and doomed. A stealth assault on capitalism in the name of saving the planet is chic and entirely plausible. In this sense, green is the new red.
After visiting the Soviet Union in the 1920s, New Deal brain-truster Stuart Chase asked, “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking the world?” In the same spirit, Jones enthuses in his book, The Green Collar Economy, that Americans today “get to retrofit, reboot, and reenergize a nation.” Jones calls his vision a “Green New Deal,” but it’s more of an American Great Leap Forward, giving “an honored place for labor and social activists” so they can “change the direction of our society.” The effort “will require a World War II level of mobilization.”
Lunacy? Not for enviros. As Gus Speth, a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The New Yorker, “We in the environmental movement cannot fail Van Jones.”

The rest here.