Van Jones: Yeah, we enviros took a dive for Obama during the Gulf oil spill

Not exactly a stunner, you say?  Well, you’d be right, but it’s probably worse than what Jones admits here, too.  Not only did they pull their punches towards the President in 2010, they tried to shift the blame for the Deepwater Horizon spill to the Bush administration, even though Barack Obama and his Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had been on the job for more than a year — and the lack of quick response made the situation worse.  Now, though, Van Jones expresses remorse for the lack of response from the environmental community:

I’m critical of myself, first, and the environmentalists. When the oil spill had happened in the spring of 2010, there was another moment to say, ‘Hold on a second, let’s relook at energy policy in America. Should we be subsidizing companies who are risking our health immediately and in the long-term?’” We didn’t do it. You’ve never seen the environmental movement more quiet during an oil spill. I guarantee you, if John McCain had been President, with that oil spill, or George Bush had been President with that oil spill, I’d have been out there with a sign protesting. I didn’t, because of who the President was. Well, that’s a bad, uh, uh…that’s not good for the earth, it’s not good for the cause, it’s probably not good for the President. It’s certainly not the way we should conduct ourselves.

And so, I’m very tough on progressive movements and leaders, including myself, who did not stand on principle, based upon who we looked across and saw as President.

Uh-huh.  The timing of this isn’t very good for Obama, but it’s not as if Jones will abandon Obama, or the rest of his enviro allies, either.  This sounds more like a mild warning shot from Jones to get Obama focused once again on hammering oil companies and traditional energy producers on behalf of so-called “green tech” subsidies.  Since the first name that gets associated with those efforts is “Solyndra,” Jones had better be prepared for even more disappointment in the future.