I was somewhat surprised by the news that “Pancho” Dobbs is being driven out of leaving CNN, bbut not terribly so; CNN is trying to draw a broader audience than FOX “News,” so something was going to have to give. I expect that Pancho will take the same road his old friend (and alleged rapist/murderer) Glenn Beck took, the one that leads out of CNN and straight to FOX. He’ll be happy there, at home among the bigots, wack jobs, and idiots.

The noise around Pancho is obscuring another wingnut media story that I find much more interesting.

By all appearances, the Washington Times is on the verge of being shut down. The Times is, of course, owned by those exceptionally loony folks of the Unification Church (who are also longtime bestest buddies of the Bushes, not to mention their neighbors down in Paraguay.) It appears that some kind of Moonie family feud is playing itself out in the “news”room of the Times, where the guys who sit around making shit up some of the highest executives of the lie rag newspaper have been shitcanned. It appears that they lost their jobs because The Rev. Sun Myung Moon (church founder and Times owner) is in some kind of a struggle with one of his sons over the vast right wing empire of the Unification Church. Since the executives were daddy’s pals, junior threw them out.

Those family feuds can get really nasty, you know. We’ve lost 4,300 of our sons and daughters because Chimpy decided to show his daddy how “tough” he is. I would hope that if the Moon family feud continues, they’ll finish it in the traditional cult ritual of mass suicide. I mean….. it’s good that they’re (apparently) destroying their so-called newspaper, but why stop there? Make a statement the world will long remember, for Dog’s sake!

Hyun-jin Preston Moon, the son of Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon who controls the Washington Times, acted without his father’s blessing in firing the top leadership of the newspaper over the weekend, a Unificationist and former Times staffer who is in contact with high church officials tells TPM.

Preston’s reasons for carrying out the shakeup are not clear to the source, but “one thing that is clear is that he acted alone. This is not something the Reverend Moon wanted, ever.”

A newsroom source told us yesterday that Preston fired the executives, all members of the church, when they sided with his father in a feud over the doling out of Rev. Moon’s religio-business empire in ways not to the liking of Preston.

Now, more details about the ongoing conflict — which may put the future of the newspaper at risk — are coming to light.

It’s unclear how intertwined the internal family dispute, which centers on Preston’s anger at the selection of his young brother Hyung-jin Moon as Rev. Moon’s heir apparent, is with the paper’s lack of financial sustainability. That problem was cited by the Washington Times in the press release announcing the firings over the weekend. The operations of the paper have been heavily subsidized by the church since the Times’ founding as an anti-communist outlet in the early 1980s.

The Unificationist source tells us the feud dates back at least to a January birthday party for Rev. Moon at the church-owned Manhattan Center on 34th Street in New York. At that event, Rev. Moon designated Hyung-jin as the church’s new leader. But Preston has “refused to acknowledge the authority of his younger brother” and “refused to comply with guidance from his father,” the source says.

Any cult that lasts long enough has these schisms. Few cults have been as despicable as the Moonies have been, and few cults have been as detrimental to the world. These guys slugging it out is good for the world in general, so let’s hope nobody backs down anytime soon.

Tags: bush, lies, moonies, rushpublicans, washington times

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1:18 am and is filed under Analysis, Jolly Roger, Unstable Wingnuts of the Radical Right. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.