Van Jones Talks Green Collar Jobs with Stephen Colbert

I am a devoted consumer of fake news. But, while I was traveling this past week, I fell behind on my Colbert-Stewart NewsHour - perhaps the finest hour of fake news on cable TV. Because of my foray, I missed green collar activist Van Jones. Fortunately, that doesn't matter. Now you just tap some buttons and...presto, you're watching the clip. Anyways, the Van Jones on Colbert thing first caught my eye courtesy of Shannon Moore, at the excellent blog, Local Warming.

Van Jones founded Green For All, which was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007. The non-profit grew out of Van’s work on a green job program through the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Oakland, CA. Van founded the Center in 1996, which promotes alternatives to violence and incarceration, including its successful “Books Not Bars” campaign that has helped reduce California’s overall youth prison population by more than 30 percent. Follow this link for more on what Van Jones has to say, via the live blogging David Anderson of Green Options did last spring

So, after I finished reading Shannon's post, I was concerned that the gregarious Colbert wouldn't let Van get a word in edgewise (which he has been known to do). Shannon wrote that she was disappointed in Colbert, "who has a way of shifting people off topic if he does not believe what they have to say." However, my read of the interview was much different. I thought Colbert was actually relatively mild, and gave Jones plenty of time to get his points across, which Jones did.

The thing about Colbert is, even when he appears to be dominating an interview or "shifting people off topic," he is rarely doing it because he "does not believe what they have to say." Quite the contrary actually. Stephen Colbert the character and conservative pundit may not buy into what his left-leaning guests have to say - but Stephen Colbert the actor, performer, and liberal pundit most certainly does. Colbert gets it and he knows exactly what he is doing. Which, in case you don't watch, or don't 'get it' yourself, is pointing out the flawed arguments made by conservatives and liberals without pointing directly at them.