Two years after the worst marine oil spill in history, former White House adviser Van Jones now admits that he and other progressives sat quietly on the sidelines to avoid making President Obama look bad, as The Blaze notes:

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 on who we looked across and saw as president.

Conveniently, Jones's admission against interest comes years after the fact at a time when the oil spill is fairly low on the nation's radar. Though Jones's comments seem limited to the Deepwater Horizon spill, the same could really be said of the anti-war movement. There were large protests in many cities in 2007-2008 against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once Obama took office, all of that public opposition melted away. This is despite the fact that Obama ordered a surge of troops in Afghanistan, failed to close the prison facility at Gitmo and actually increased the number of deadly drone strikes.

The mainstream media also deserves a lot of the blame here. It's understandable why partisans like Van Jones would only speak up when their speech can be used against the GOP. What's not clear is why the supposedly neutral media also lost interest in the anti-war and environmentalist movements the moment Obama took office. It seems the MSM is just an echo chamber for progressive chatter, one that neither tones down obviously partisan attacks or plays up their absence when a Democrat takes office.