Van Jones was one of those sneaky czars that Barack Obama wanted to advise him; it seems he's very comfortable surrounded with a rabble of hard-lefties. Jones was the czar for green jobs, which is a phrase fraught with terror if I ever heard one, combining a hot-button word and coercion.

Mr. Jones called President Bush a crackhead and he was forced to resign in September from his job after it came out that he was allied with one of those 9/11 truther organizations. Hard to imagine behavior too raw for this administration to get rid of someone, but this was.

Mr. Jones is now a lecturer at Princeton University (Einstein's old home; I wonder if he's spinning in his grave) and at Washington's Center for American Progress, where he will be giving us the same old tale: that green is good. It is of course nothing more than an excuse for socialism. The Center for American Progress was founded by rich liberals for a left-wing think-tank; they also founded Air America, which just died, a complete and total failure. When the water reaches the top deck, follow the rats. The last rat from Air America is Senator Franken.

Mr. Jones explained in an official Princeton statement he looks forward to "exploring solutions to our nation's toughest challenges with the students and scholars of Princeton."

"America is at a crossroads, facing economic and ecological crises. The next generation of job-creating, green solutions will be even more challenging to conceive. And they will be even more difficult to implement."

But Mr. Jones feels that a university education must help students become revolutionaries and he has stated that students who are not activists are getting "worthless degrees."

On the face of it, Mr. Jones' stated aims of green jobs would require engineering and other talent to make them possible, and none of that talent is made by activists getting degrees in political science, but by non-activist engineers getting degrees in, er, engineering. I recall when I was in college we sneered at the politico types because we were doing quantifiable things.

But then for Mr. Jones and his friends, it's really all about the socialism, and destroying capitalism, which made him the perfect pick for Mr. Obama. It doesn't bother Mr. Jones, if he's thought it through, that he'll need smart scientists and engineers to have his green jobs. But then he has called himself a communist and that's his true belief, not greenery or environmentalism.

Do not expect to see Mr. Obama take a dose of reality as did Mr. Clinton in 1994. He's a True Believer too.