Let's debate real issues

[Commentary] In a more sensible world, media firestorms would be doused by the cold water of common sense. Fresh from successfully targeting then-White House green-jobs adviser Van Jones, right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck Twittered his followers to "find everything you can on Cass Sunstein (the regulatory czar), Mark Lloyd (Federal Communications Commission diversity czar) and Carol Browner (energy czar)." He later added White House science adviser John Holdren to the lengthening list of Obama administration staffers whom he calls "radical" or "revolutionary." Far from being bomb throwers, Browner was the longest-serving Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School, Holdren has taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Lloyd was an attorney at a leading communications law firm and Jones authored a best-selling book about how to create high-skill, high-wage jobs in environmentally friendly industries. Perhaps the most incendiary action that all five of these leading academics, attorneys and career public servants could take would be to burn their lengthy résumés. "Personnel is policy," Beck has declared to defend demonizing obscure officeholders. Well, policy really is policy. So let's debate health care, energy, economics and education, not some broadcaster's boogeymen.