Palin's Noxious Ghostwriter

Vincent and McCain, for example, stated the Democrats were “perilously close” to committing treason for their opposition to the war on Iraq and insisted that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program in the days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They also claimed, based on alleged information supposedly culled by Congressman Richard Nixon on the House Un-American Affairs Committee, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a “puppet” of Joseph Stalin. And finally they predicted that the Democrats would “surely lose” the 2006 congressional midterms if they made Republican corruption a centerpiece of their campaign. Vincent and McCain might have come to regret this if the book had made any noticeable impact. Instead, Donkey Cons was generally ignored by both the targets of the authors’ invective and conservatives, too.

So who is McCain? A former staffer for the conservative Washington Times, McCain has managed to become a player on the far right fringe, stirring controversy almost everywhere he goes. McCain was recruited to the Times in 1997 from a small paper in rural Georgia by former Times managing editor Fran Coombs. Under the watch of Coombs and editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden, both Southern conservatives with connections to white nationalist groups, McCain turned the Times’ “Culture Briefs” section into a bulletin board for the racist right, promoting articles from racist publications like the Occidental Quarterly and the Virginia-based neo-Nazi leader Bill White, who has described McCain as a friend. McCain was himself a member of the neo-Confederate group, the League of the South, which favors a “second secession” from the United States and has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In his spare time, McCain busied himself by ranting about interracial marriage on an online message board. "[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,” McCain  wrote. “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 [caps in original], no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."

According to former Washington Times reporter George Archibald, during a discussion in the newsroom about civil rights in August 2002, McCain rose from his desk to defend slavery as “good for the blacks and good for property owners.” “He is just a complete animalistic racist,” Archibald told me. Marlene Johnson, the Times’ former arts section editor and an African-American, told me McCain was “an avowed segregationist.”

When I began reporting on McCain’s racial exploits for an article for The Nation, which was published on September 20, 2006, I began receiving unsolicited late night phone calls from McCain. In one such call, McCain refused to respond to the allegations leveled by his colleagues. Instead, he insisted I come to the Raven Grill, a dive bar in Washington DC’s Mount Pleasant section, to meet him and someone named “Carlos.” I simply repeated my request for a response to the charges. McCain again refused. Finally, the bizarre phone calls stopped.

Soon after my article was published, McCain was placed on probation at the Times, purportedly because of his anemic work habits. He quit soon after and started a blog. The following year, the Times owners, from Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church cult, ousted Coombs and replaced Pruden (who was set to retire to any case) with Washington Post reporter John Solomon. (The crisis has continued to the present day, as a family feud within the Church prompted Moon’s son, Preston, to fire the paper’s new executive leadership last week. Solomon has left under unexplained circumstances. Now, the Times’ very survival is in question).

McCain, for his part, does not seem to have changed much since leaving the paper. In September, McCain wrote on his blog that liberal Jews could be converted into conservatives if Republicans could find “some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads.” During Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip in January, McCain posed as an earnest defender of Jewish interests, calling Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald a “wicked satire of a stereotypical self-hating Jew” for Greenwald’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s military campaign.