But it's not Tweety I want to talk about here (or ever, for that matter). In the middle section of the column, Foser outlines Insight Magazine's recent attempt to smear Barack Obama as some sort of madrassa mole infiltrating our government. And he's absolutely correct -- the article was a botched amalgam of the worst sorts of conjecture and innuendo, relying on its readers' conditioned stereotypes of race and xenophobia to connect the heuristic dots for them. Not only is Obama black, but he was raised Muslim; you might as well hand your daughters over to Osama bin Laden right now.
How disreputable is InsightMag.com? Wesley Pruden, editor-in-chief of its sister publication, The Washington Times, wrote a January 23 column in which he tried so strenuously to distance himself from Insight that we fear he may have sprained something.
Writing about InsightMag.com's Obama story, Pruden first described it as having "appeared in an Internet journal," then got a little more specific, referring to "Insight, the Internet magazine." Finally, Pruden admitted: "Insight, which is owned by the owners of The Washington Times but is absolutely, positively and entirely separate from the newspaper..." When even Wes Pruden feels the need to disassociate himself from you, it's a pretty good sign you have problems. But Pruden can't walk away from InsightMag.com so easily: His "Pruden on Politics" column runs not only in The Washington Times, but in InsightMag.com as well.
This is true enough. Insight is wholly owned and operated by the Moonie Times, and shares editorial staff, Pruden among them. But Foser stops there, and I'm having trouble understanding why. You can't overstate the fact that the Times is the propaganda organ for the Unification "Church", and its lunatic cult leader/self-proclaimed messiah. There's just no getting around this; it's like failing to mention that the pope is Catholic.
And Pruden is a racist neoconfederate clown, and proudly so. That also cannot be mentioned too often when referring to these people, and I use the term very loosely.
But even as it has enjoyed cozy relations with Washington politicos, from its earliest days the Times has been a hothouse for hard-line racialists and neo-Confederates. Pruden, who started at the paper in 1982, was their wizard. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister who served as chaplain to the Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, the leading segregationist group in town. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers integrating Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, Pruden Sr. reportedly told an assembled mob, "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists and cops!"
In 1993 Pruden gave an interview to the now-defunct neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, which routinely published proslavery apologias and attacks on Abraham Lincoln. Pruden boasted, "Every year I make sure that we have a story in the paper about any observance of Robert E. Lee's birthday.... And the fact that it falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."
"Makes it all the better," interjected a Partisan editor.
"I make sure we have a story. Oh, yes," said Pruden.
George Archibald, a former correspondent nominated for four Pulitzers during his twenty-three years at the Times, told me that when Pruden assigned him to travel to Arkansas in 1992 to dig for damaging information on Bill Clinton, a man named "Justice" Jim Johnson was the first source Pruden instructed him to meet. Johnson was a leader of the Capital Citizens Council chapter that Pruden's father belonged to. (In 1995 Pruden published two anti-Clinton op-ed articles by Johnson, who was later linked to right-wing billionaire financier Richard Mellon Scaife's Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million scheme in which "sources" were paid to help concoct anti-Clinton stories.)
When Coombs joined the Times in 1988, he became a charter member of Pruden's neo-Confederate cabal. Reared by a military family in rural Virginia, Coombs attended a private high school and William and Mary College, where he was known as a hard partyer with a vast collection of rock-and-roll records. After graduating Coombs cut his teeth at several Virginia papers and the States News Service. He pursued journalism as an extension of his family's military tradition. His motto, which he would recite time and again in the Times newsroom: "Journalism is war."
In his 1993 Southern Partisan interview, Pruden proudly recounted Coombs's speech that year at the Capitol hailing Confederate President Jefferson Davis. "I read the speech and it was quite good," Pruden told the Partisan. "I was originally asked to speak, but I was going to be out of town and Fran filled in for me. He was telling me what a thrilling thing it was to stand there and sing 'Dixie' in the statuary hall of the U.S. Capitol. I would have liked to have been there just for that."
While Coombs sympathized with Pruden's Lost Cause nostalgia, his politics were even harsher. "The thing about Wes is, he has other vices," said a Times senior staffer. "He loves a good meal, loves to have his ego stroked, he loves women, the social scene. As for bashing blacks and Hispanics, he shares Fran's views, but he has other preoccupations. Fran is the really hard-core ideological white supremacist."
So. We have overt racists and neoconfederates running an agitprop sheet for the Moonies, who have never been shy about muscling favors out of politicians, especially the Bushes.
And Moon is nothing if not a diversified messiah; he has his fingers in a lot of pies:
Even as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church falters as a religion in the United States, it remains a robust, diverse business -- especially in the Washington area, where the movement controls more than $300 million in commercial, political and cultural enterprises.
From rundown city storefronts to gleaming suburban office buildings, from ornately refurbished mansions to mundane tract housing, organizations owned or sponsored by Moon and his inner circle of Korean and American followers hold properties stretching from Prince George's to Fairfax counties, according to corporate, property and court records.
This vast and bewildering multinational could be called Moon Inc. It is a sprawling collection of churches, nonprofit foundations and for-profit holding companies whose global operations include computers and religious icons in Japan, seafood in Alaska, weapons and ginseng in Korea, huge tracts of land in South America, a university in Bridgeport, Conn., a recording studio and travel agency in Manhattan, a horse farm in Texas and a golf course in California.
But the paper, while efficient enough at hitting the wingnut butter churn for the pre-frontal lobotomy crowd, is the ultimate loss-leader enterprise, and is costing Super Messiah Cult Guy an unacceptable amount of pelf, reputedly as much as $2 billion since 1982. Moon may have to sell more missiles to Kim Jong Il to recoup his losses.
In the meantime, there is a very ugly power struggle going on at the Times, as Pruden and Coombs are being forced out the door. Problem is, they know where all the bodies are buried, and they've just spent the last quarter-century creating shit out of thin air. Doing it to a contentious former employer would be gravy to knuckle-draggers like those two.
From 18 years experience working with this man as a close editor, I can say categorically that Coombs is a micro-manager, has a very bad temper, abuses employees, and looks down on women (except if he sees one he says has "nice tits" or "nice body," or "nice ass" or who he would like to have sex with, which he often voiced in my persence[sic], including about a particular higher female editor who was his superior.)
Coombs very often voiced dislike for blacks, Jews, Hispanics, privately in his office with me alone, sometimes in the newsroom around the national desk, and always when he got drunk at parties at his home where he drank liquor and smoked marijuana.
At one party at his home after he had consumed copious amounts of liquor and smoked marijuana, Coombs passed out on the outside deck of his home and had to be physically carried to bed by those remaining at the party and his wife, Marian.
A lot of Archibald's screed reads like sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee. The guy was fine with cashing a check from these cockroaches for over two decades; now that he's down the road, he can dish the dirt. Real fuckin' brave there, Cholly.
I don't mean to quibble with the level of detail in Foser's column; it is, after all, a weekly synopsis of relevant items, and as such has to be concise. But, when mentioning the Times or Insight, you're only telling half the story if you don't iterate the fact that it's a money pit run by an egomaniacal cult whackjob, a convicted felon with unsavory business holdings around the world, and a lot of hidden leverage on a lot of powerful people.
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