This San Francisco Chronicle editorial reveals so much about the leftist mindset that I found it almost charming. Their position on Van Jones is not that there's anything wrong with his thinking, but that the Obama administration is too busy to be bothered having to defend him:

This administration has far too many pressing issues on its plate to spend its energy defending Jones' past statements on race and politics, his support of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal or his association with the conspiracy theorists trying to link the Bush White House to 9/11.

The White House either missed the inflammatory aspects of Jones' past - which raises serious questions about its vetting process - or assumed they would never become an issue, which suggests a certain naivete about the ways of Washington.

It's hard for me to believe that they didn't know damned well about Jones's radical activism, because all of it -- including his unabashed Communism -- is just a Google click away. And if they did know, then his appointment might not have been naivete at all, but a deliberate and cynical serving of red meat for conservative and libertarian wolves. But why? To bait them? To set them up? For what? It hardly makes Jones's critics look bad; in fact, it would only seem to confirm their warnings about what could be expected from the kind of guy who hung out with the likes of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

OTOH, the Jones appointment might also have been a bone thrown to the hard, Communist left. One of "theirs" was appointed to something, but see what happened!

And then of course it might have been intended as another distraction, for it certainly provided that. But distraction from what?

A distraction here, a distraction there, and pretty soon this will become a distraction administration.

MORE: The Wall Street Journal opines that like Ayers and Wright before him, Jones too has been "thrown under the bus."

Can I think stick my neck out here and venture that I detect a pattern?