Arianna Thanks Glenn Beck for Getting Van Jones Fired

Give Arianna Huffington some credit: she still knows how to surprise people. When her personal friend (and former gubernatorial campaign adviser) Van Jones was ousted from his White House job after Glenn Beck’s incessant needling, it would have been the easy move for Huffington to decry the firing and jump reflexively on the Glenn Beck hate train. Instead, Huffington thanked Beck in a recent Huffington Post column. But why?

It’s not like she’s any big fan of Beck’s; she says that his was a “vile and vicious smear campaign.” But according to Huffington, Van Jones was as miscast in his role as Special Advisor for Green Jobs as “John Wayne [when he] took on the role of Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.” In not taking an administrative job, she claims, he will be freer to pursue the kind of creative activism that put him on Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list.

But how realistic is this? Huffington hopes that Jones’ ouster “will provoke a conversation about how people’s past should impact what they are able to do in the present,” but the U.S. does not exactly have a grand political tradition of forgiving past transgressions. John Kerry arguably lost the 2004 election because he had protested the Vietnam War more than 30 years before; currently, Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, Bob McDonnell, is under fire for a graduate thesis that he wrote over 20 years ago.

There are a few notable exceptions — Elliot Spitzer seems to be doing a decent job of reviving his reputation and his approval rating thanks to his Slate column and the timeliness of his reputation as a crusader against corrupt financial institutions — but in general, the rule is “one strike, you’re out.” The circumstances of his resignation may establish Jones as a hero of the political left and allow him to do work as an activist, but odds are against his ever again getting back into a position of power within the government.

Still, Huffington wrote a thoughtful and thought-provoking column, and well worth the read. You can find it here.

Related: Van Jones: Czar of Hotness