Demagogue

As someone who loves The Washington Times for it's fun-filled, right-wing racist/sexist/homophobic/anti-Semitic views, I really loved reading this sweet little expose from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Marian Kester Coombs is a woman who believes America has become a "den of iniquity" thanks to "its efforts to accommodate minorities."

White men should "run, not walk" to wed "racially conscious" white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites. Latinos are "rising to take this country away from those who made it," the "Euroamericans." [That line is especially funny.] Muslims are "human hyenas" who "smell blood" and are "closing in" on their "weakened prey," meaning "the white race." Blacks, Coombs sneers, are "saintly victims who can do no wrong." Black solidarity and non-white immigration are imposing "racial revolution and decomposition" in America.
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Marian Kester Coombs is married to Francis Booth Coombs, managing editor of the hard-right newspaper The Washington Times. Fran Coombs has published at least 35 of his wife's news and opinion pieces for his paper, although his relationship to her is not acknowledged in her Times bylines.

And that's not all. Fran Coombs has presided over the Times' republication of articles taken from white supremacist hate groups, not to mention allowing a key employee at the paper to write fawning pieces about the same groups.

Just this February, Times officials had to apologize to a Jewish group for publishing one anti-Semitic ad for a book called For Fear of the Jews. What they didn't say was that they had published similar ads nine other times in a single month last fall, plus another from a key Holocaust denial outfit.

Both Coombses declined comment. So did Washington Times editor in chief Wesley Pruden and officials of the organization that owns the newspaper.

Most of Marian Coombs' especially inflammatory writings have appeared in white supremacist venues such as The Occidental Quarterly, which ran her glowing review of a book on "racially conscious" whites by Robert S. Griffin, a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. But the Times has published its share.
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The Washington Times is relatively small (circulation 102,000) and money-losing (it's been estimated that its backer, the Unification Church, has spent more than $1 billion to keep it going over the past 22 years). But its influence cannot be measured in those statistics. President Reagan once described it as his favorite paper. The first President Bush said it "in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C."

That influence may have reached a public peak this winter, when President George W. Bush invited its top leaders — including Coombs, Pruden, Hanner and others — to the White House for an exclusive, 40-minute interview. The resulting stories were spread across the front page of the Times' Jan. 12 edition.

Presumably the president, who on Feb. 8 denounced "the baggage of bigotry" and called racism "the central defect of our founding," knew little of the paper's record on race.

I'd love more than anything to see this paper denounced publicly by Bush and Republicans everywhere or to see their own reputations tarnished for being so supportive of the folks from the Moonie rag-- but I'm not holding my breath.

(By way of Atrios. I know, I know, it's Atrios. But this needs as much exposure as possible.)