Van Jones and Background Checks

First off in the interest of full disclosure, I love Van Jones "The Green Collar Economy" and still recommend reading it. Until last week, Van Jones served as a special adviser to the President on green jobs. Last week some comments out where Van Jones is a "truther" (people who question what happened on 9-11) who organized copwatch.com which actually blames the NYPD for the loss of many firefighters on that horrific day. Additionally thanks to a firestorm from FOX's Glenn Beck a video come out where he referred to the Republicans as "a**holes". Van Jones resigned over the holiday weekend.

We as country all lived through this, Van. I sat through 2 funerals from the Pentagon crashes. One didn't even have casket. It happened. I wrote my college application essays on that horrible day. I read the governments 9-11 commission report. But, I'm not here to write about 9-11 or our country's reaction. Van, like all Americans, has a right to his opinion whether or not I disagree with it or not is truly besides the point here. Van, we agree to disagree.

I dug a bit deeper to find how such a perfectly operational campaign and now Barack Obama White House got "punked" in this situation. Apparently, there was no background check done when he was hired. All they had to do was Google "copwatch re-evaluating nypd performance on 9-11" and this blemish never would have happened. We live in imperfect world and expect our politicians to be perfect. The WH dropped the ball here on the background check. Politicians who we give the privilege of running our country to need to be perfect in order to get elected. I understand that, but you can't have this type of behavior and expect to hold a public office of any kind. For those of you in HR or hiring roles at your company, I implore you to not only do a basic background check so problems like this don't arise in your company. Here's to hoping the new "Mr/s. Green jobs" is properly vetted.