Huffington Post is casting the resignation of a National Endowment for the Arts spokesman as the Obama administration’s latest under-the-bus kill.
Yosi Sergant, whose communications background reportedly includes a stint with Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister, is stepping down, HuffPo reports today. (UPDATE: HuffPo and the Washington Times now report that Sergant has been "reassigned," not sacked.)
His resignation comes days after Van Jones, a mid-level adviser to the White House on "Green Jobs" issues, stepped down, principally because he had signed a petition in 2004 that suggested that the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 2001 attacks (Jones claimed the preamble, with its "truther" language, was unfamiliar to him. Other signatories, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, believe it was inserted after the fact.)
It’s unclear what exactly is behind Sergant’s resignation, which HuffPo says is forced. Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who played a key role in forcing out Jones, targeted Sergant because of his role in an Aug. 10 conference call soliciting artists to join "United We Serve," an administration initiative promoting community service. In the video below Beck — never an exemplar of coherence — likens the push to similar efforts during the Wilson administration (which gave us James Montgomery Flagg’s "I Want You!" image), or to Goebbels, or to both. It’s not really clear.
That said, bringing the NEA into the "United We Serve" push is kind of creepy; NEA funding does not come close to the levels of other Western nations in backing the arts, but it is hugely influential because arts philanthropists use NEA-seeded projects as a guide for where to give money. NEA’s participation in a call-out to artists to help an administration initiative suggests a quid pro quo in a way in which the other two sponsors of the call, the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Corporation for National and Community Service, do not.
Another factor in Sergant’s resignation might have been this nice little gotcha by the Washington Times’ conservative editorial page; they caught him in a bizarre and easily proven lie, when he insisted he had only listened in on the call, and was not one of those organizing it. (He had, in fact, sent out the invitations via email.)
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