That Other Times

It’s
been almost comical watching the wolf pack of predominantly male commentators
and media critics of every political persuasion ripping into The New
York Times, which in their estimation is on a devious and dangerous crusade
to compel a golf club to–heavens to Betsy!–actually admit womenfolk.
The way Times editor Howell Raines is pushing this issue, they seem to
be saying, you’d think it was the year 2002 or something!

And ever
since it was revealed last week that the Times spiked a couple of male
sportswriters’ columns about the topic–columns the Times editors
said didn’t gel with their editorial policy, or whatever–and the specter
of censorship has suddenly been raised (though the Times did eventually
run the columns), well, we can all just talk about that now rather than
discuss the threatening issue of gender parity.

Whew!

So, I’m
sure you’ll excuse me for focusing instead this week, once again, on the
eerie goings-on at that other Times. I think in the end you’ll agree
that the viewpoints and values of a certain Washington Times editor are
a lot more grotesque than Raines’ sinister plot to foster equal rights.

Last week
I quoted the scary Washington Times’ backer, the Unification Church
leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon ("Satan’s harvest is America," was
just one of that charmers’ comments), whose paper Al Gore two weeks ago
charged was "part and parcel of the Republican Party." Some people
wrote in with the rather weak but nonetheless entertainable argument that Moon
funds the paper but he has a "hands-off" approach and let’s the
editors do what they want. (George H.W. Bush made the same claim, by the way–even
though a former Washington Times editor has stated otherwise–back
in 1996, when Papa Bush collected $100,000 from Moon and his cult for a speaking
engagement at which Bush praised the publication as "a paper that in my
view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.")

So, let’s
take a look at the views and not-so-hidden agenda of one of the actual editors
of the paper, specifically, assistant national editor Robert Stacy McCain, who
has a habit of posting commentary on message boards and elsewhere around the
Internet:

"[T]he
media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly
rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion.
The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk
may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT
RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."

Yes, you
read that right: a "natural revulsion" and "THIS IS NOT RACISM."

That was
posted by Robert Stacy McCain (who has contributed to New York Press in
the past) on a website called Reclaiming the South. The Washington
Times editor posts a lot on the right-wing FreeRepublic.com as well, using
an assumed name (BurkeCalhounDabney) but often linking back to his personal
website, where there are photos of him and the rest of his large family of Seventh
Day Adventists (and which identifies him by his real name and as a Washington
Times editor). Editor McCain, who hails from Rome, GA, is one of those Confederate
types who still hasn’t gotten over the Civil War and is trying to get the
South to secede. He’s a member of a Southern secessionist organization
called League of the South. Here’s a quote from that group’s leader,
Michael Hill:

"The
day of Southern guilt is over–THE SOUTH WAS RIGHT–and let us not forget
that salient fact. NO APOLOGIES FOR SLAVERY should be made. In both the Old
and New Testaments slavery is sanctioned and regulated according to God’s
word. Thus, when practiced in accord with Holy Scripture, it is NOT A SIN. Our
ancestors were not evil men because they held slaves. This issue is our Achilles
Heel, and the only way to deal with it is to confront our accusers boldly and
without guilt. After all, what we are really upholding is GOD’S WORD. Let
us fear Him, and we’ll fear no man."

Perhaps
attempting (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to distance himself just a bit from
this repugnant and totally kooky extremist stuff, McCain has written, in a piece
he posted on the Web titled "Down On Dixie: The Confederate Cause and the
South’s Scalawag Press," that "We may never all agree that The
South Was Right!…but the least we owe our ancestors is a fair hearing and
a balanced portrayal to our readers."

McCain,
an editor and sometimes commentator at a paper that the gay Andrew Sullivan,
the African-American Thomas Sowell and other right-leaning members of minority
groups are only too happy to write columns for and take cash from, believes
that Abraham Lincoln was a "war criminal" who should have been tried
for "treason." (His reasoning, he writes, is that Lincoln and the
Northerners were the true racists; something tells me–actually, studying
his other comments and affiliations is what tells me–that that is not the
real reason at all.)

In his Web
postings McCain has stated that Harvard president Lawrence Summers should be
"persecuted and run out of town" for supporting gay rights. He also
believes that the civil rights movement directly resulted in "black criminality"
because people were encouraged to break the law by getting arrested at demonstrations!

"I
am disturbed…by [Jesse] Jackson’s idea that ‘breaking white folks’
rules’ was somehow inherently just," he wrote on FreeRepublic.com.
"If rules were to be broken merely because they were work of white folks,
then hasn’t Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of
black criminality that began in the 1960s? This shows how the civil rights movement,
to a great extent, represented a direct assault on tradition and law."

These viewpoints
offer background for and insight into some of McCain’s pieces in The Washington Times. This past October he warned about the "Backlash
Building in White America," as the headline of his article blared, and
he interviewed and promoted an obscure professor who claimed "that society
should combat white nationalists in part by acknowledging the legitimacy of
some of their grievances" and that white nationalism is "the monster
that identity politics created." (Yes, blame it all on blacks themselves!)

Some of
McCain’s Washington Times articles are reprinted, presumably with
his and his paper’s permission, on a creepy website called American
Renaissance (to which McCain has written at least one letter to the editor,
offering "warm congratulations" on an article). Here’s what the
respected Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about that site: "Edited
by white separatist Jared Taylor, American Renaissance is a magazine
with a highfalutin tone that links IQ levels to racial groups and promotes eugenics,
the ‘science’ of improving the human race through selective breeding."

I do realize
that it’s immensely important for the American press’ intrepid media
reporters and critics to leave no stone unturned in their investigation into
Howell Raines’ evil crusade on behalf of the female golfers of America.
But don’t you think they could turn over just one or two measly stones
at the conservative paper of record? Seems to me they’d find a lot of rancid
stuff under those rocks.