The Washington Post Discovers Valerie Jarrett
Posted on September 29, 2010 by Ben Johnson by Ben Johnson
Dana Milbank has written an article for today’s edition of The Washington Post entitled, “Valerie Jarrett: The real center of Obama’s inner circle.” In it, Milbank properly writes no matter who replaces Rahm Emanuel as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, “the real power” resides “upstairs from the Oval Office, in the second-floor quarters of Valerie Jarrett.” However, Milbank omits the fact that Jarrett is a left-wing extremist who has served as the chief conduit of the far-Left into the Obama administration — and that she is, unfortunately, the perfect reflection of the president’s and the first lady’s shared values and beliefs.
The brief article states — as if it were news, because it is to those who rely on the mainstream media — that Valerie Jarrett is the most influential person in the White House next to Michelle Obama. It also notes several wisely anonymous officials “raised questions about Jarrett’s effectiveness and judgment.” It then recounts a few of Jarrett’s most recent, misguided actions. She convinced Obama to keep Eric Holder in place as Attorney General, to appoint left-wing ideologue Elizabeth Warren as founding head of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (a source told Milbank, “Elizabeth Warren is in the administration because of Valerie”), and to hire their mutual Chicago pal Desiree Rogers as social secretary. Rogers’ lax security policies and diva pretensions resulted in the Salahis crashing a state dinner last year.
But it is leaving out many other areas Jarrett has exercised her unparalleled influence.
During the 2008 campaign, black campaign staff told the New York Times without Jarrett’s intervention, “the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like [Al] Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff.”
It was Jarrett who recruited “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones, the Marxist, 9/11 Truther, and conspiracy hound. She told a left-wing crowd she had been “watching him…for as long as he’s been active with Oakland” — presumably including his stint as head of the Maoist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) — and was “delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House.”
She also brought in Mark Lloyd, the first-ever “Diversity Czar” at the Federal Communications Commission. At the Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice, Lloyd said:
[W]e have really, truly good white people in important positions [in the media]. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem. We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.
Lloyd now has influence in the granting of FCC charters to compel non-minority stations to “step down.”
She and the staff at the Orwellian-sounding Office of Public Engagement held a “cultural policy summit” in D.C. last spring that included several of Van Jones’ associates, a host of radicals who accuse the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods, the “former International Spokeswoman for the Universal Zulu Nation” (a woman who goes by the name “Rha Goddess”), and a self-described “Jewish lesbian” who admitted, “I have a little crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejiad.”
She and her office — including former member Buffy Wicks, herself a far-left-winger — famously pressured federal grant recipients to produce pro-Obama propaganda at taxpayer expense.
This association with anti-American radicals would be disturbing enough in a low-level staffer. Jarrett is anything but. She is, in many ways, the touchstone that makes both Obamas who they are. The president admitted he runs every decision by her. Jarrett described their relationship thus: “We have kind of a mind meld.” She told Vogue magazine, “I kind of know what makes them who they are.” That kind of power cannot be bought or elected. It also shows how deep a mess our nation is in. The problem is not Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Elizabeth Warren, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, or any other low-level leftist creeping around the executive office building. It is the president himself, whose values are best encapsulated by Jarrett.
This author wrote three weeks ago today, “No matter who holds the [chief of staff] position, Jarrett holds the reins of power.” It is gratifying to have my words parroted in the mainstream media, but it would be more beneficial if the unsettling ideologies and associations my reporting has unearthed were more widely shared, as well.
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